New PS4 known as ‘PS4.5’ might be coming to support 4K games

A new PlayStation 4 is supposedly in the works, with the purpose of supporting 4K resolutions for games.

Kotaku has claimed – citing unnamed developer sources – that Sony is developing a PS4 with more graphical power so that games can run at 4K resolution. It might not be an entirely new console but a new device/add-on that’ll bring this power boost. Whatever it ends up being, it is currently going by the name PS4.5, and it’ll include an updated GPU to support 4K resolution for games and more processing power for VR games.

Sony’s PlayStation VR will launch this autumn, and the PS4 could use the added benefit of better processing power. The console, which first released in late 2013, is already considered to be aging as well as outpaced by modern gaming PCs. Also, with a higher-end GPU, the PS4 would be able to match the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive virtual reality headsets, both of which require powerful PCs.

And by supporting 4K resolution – four times the pixel size of 1080p – the PS4 could round out its high-res capabilities. It currently outputs 4K photos and videos, but not for games. There’s no word yet on when we can expect this machine to be available. The PS4 recently went from $400 to $350, and if the PS4.5 were to be an entire console, Sony could go back to that $400 price.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Gamers will want to know if they can trade up. Developers might need to release games that work with multiple types of hardware. There’s also the question of whether only some games will run on the PS4.5.

No, Twitter isn’t ditching the 140-character limit

Contrary to rumours, Twitter wants you to continue tweeting in the moment.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, confirmed on The Today Show today once for all that the 140-character limit is going nowhere: “It’s staying. It’s a good constraint for us,” Dorsey said. “It allows for of-the-moment brevity.”

Re/Code claimed at the beginning of the year that Twitter was considering ditching its 140-character cap and instead imposing a whopping 10,000-character limit, and the whole idea was being dubbed the “Beyond 140” project. Apparently, tweets would still only show 140 characters on your timeline, but then you could expand the them to see the rest of the text. Twitter was testing this feature with no word on when it would debut it.

Shortly after that report made the rounds, Dorsey took to Twitter to share a message that itself was well over the limit. The tweet, which was a ironically a screenshot, noted tweets with character limitations are a beautiful constraint that inspire creativity, but Dorsey also admitted that Twitter observed its users and notice they often tweet screenshots of text when they have more to say.

Dorsey made it seem like Twitter was interested in or at least exploring lifting the cap, but in hindsight, he might’ve just been talking about how it would be cool if Twitter could somehow read texts in tweeted screenshots.

pic.twitter.com/bc5RwqPcAX

— Jack (@jack) January 5, 2016

Uber reportedly bought at least 100,000 Mercedes Benz S-Classes

Quick recap: ride-sharing behemoth Uber is famous for connecting passengers with people who have their own cars. (Well, among other things.) Uber doesn’t own a fleet of cars for would-be drivers to use, which makes the fact that the company seems to have purchased least 100,000 Mercedes Benz S-Classes from Daimler all the more fascinating. What gives? Germany’s Manager Magazin, which broke the story earlier today, was quick to point out one crucial similarity between the two companies: they’re both investing heavily in making autonomous cars a reality.

After all, Uber more-or-less raided Carnegie Mellon University last year in search of its brightest software engineers. A well-respected school in Pittsburgh might seem an odd target, but CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center had a stunning concentration of technical know-how — just the sort of talent to help make cars that can “see” and steer him or herself. When all was said and done, Uber wound up with roughly 40 researchers that were once part of an oft-trumpeted partnership with the company and the school.

Mercedes, on the other hand, has been working for a few years now to build autonomous driving technology into its street-ready vehicles. The premium S-Class has been able to park, maintain safe distances from other cars in tight, stop-and-go traffic without the aid of a driver. It’s possible we could see Uber’s technical talent build more intelligent systems on top of Mercedes’ foundation, but that requires a level of access that a prestigious carmaker would easily shy away from.

That’s what makes the number of cars Uber bought so important. Selling 100,000 S-Classes in one go is pretty crazy — that’s about the number of S-Classes Mercedes managed to sell in a single year. Prepare for just a little math: if we assume Uber worked out a sweet volume deal and got each car for $80,000 (suggested price in the US is about $95,000), that works out to an $8 billion price tag. That’s about €7.1 billion, or put another way, a full 8 percent of all the money Daimler made off of Mercedes-Benz cars in 2015. Point is, Uber might not just be buying sweet cars — it’s probably trying to buy some influence and openness.

Via: Reuters

Source: Manager Magazin

Head of Xbox Phil Spencer apologizes for sexist GDC party

The technology and video game industries have been unwelcoming to women in a variety of ways for years now, with the “booth babe” at big events being a prime example. Despite an ongoing backlash against such exclusionary tactics, Microsoft seemed to think it was appropriate to have a party last night at GDC featuring scantily-clad women as some form of entertainment, and the backlash has been swift — so much so that head of Xbox Phil Spencer just released a statement apologizing for the event.

This is how the games industry excludes women: By pretending we don’t exist and having dev parties with strippers. pic.twitter.com/9GsYyEAQOo

— Jennifer Scheurle (@Gaohmee) March 18, 2016

Spencer said the party “represented Xbox and Microsoft in a way that was not consistent or aligned to our values” and went on to call it “unequivocally wrong.” Head of Xbox marketing Aaron Greenberg had earlier chimed in about the incident on Twitter, saying he was “very disappointed” and looking into the matter.

Spencer’s full statement is below.

At Xbox-hosted events at GDC this past week, we represented Xbox and Microsoft in a way that was not consistent or aligned to our values. It was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated. I know we disappointed many people and I’m personally committed to holding ourselves to higher standards. We must ensure that diversity and inclusion are central to our everyday business and core values. We will do better in the future.

The Xbox event was particularly questionable considering that the company hosted a women in games lunch event at GDC — clearly an example of one part of the company not knowing what the other was doing. We’d expect not to see another incident like this associated with Microsoft or Xbox any time soon, but it’s still rather mind-boggling that someone gave the green light to it in the first place.

Update: 4:00PM ET: Microsoft posted a letter that Phil Spencer has sent to the entire Xbox staff in which he expands on the comments made in today’s public statement. Read it below:

How we show up as an organization is incredibly important to me. We want to build and reflect the culture of team Xbox — internally and externally — a culture that each one of us can represent with pride. An inclusive culture has a direct impact on the products and services we deliver and the perception consumers have of the Xbox brand and our company, as a whole.

It has come to my attention that at Xbox-hosted events at GDC this past week, we represented Xbox and Microsoft in a way that was absolutely not consistent or aligned to our values. That was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated. This matter is being handled internally, but let me be very clear – how we represent ourselves as individuals, who we hire and partner with and how we engage with others is a direct reflection of our brand and what we stand for. When we do the opposite, and create an environment that alienates or offends any group, we justly deserve the criticism.

It’s unfortunate that such events could take place in a week where we worked so hard to engage the many different gaming communities in the exact opposite way. I am personally committed to ensuring that diversity and inclusion is central to our everyday business and our core values as a team – inside and outside the company. We need to hold ourselves to higher standards and we will do better in the future.

Via: The Verge, Crave

Source: Xbox News Wire

NPR won’t push its podcasts or app on the radio

NPR is far from oblivious to the growth in podcasting. The organisation puts out a bevy of shows that people can subscribe to, download and stream, like From the Top and Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! So it’s all the stranger that upper management has advised local stations against promoting them. In a note titled Guidance on Podcast ‘Back Announces’, Chris Turpin, VP for news programming and operations, says DJs can mention a podcast “but not in a way that explicitly endorses it.”

In practice, a station could say “that was Linda Holmes of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast,” but that’s about it. Broadcasters have been told not to promote the content of a podcast — in other words, what a particular show or episode covers — or how to access them, like through Stitcher or the company’s own NPR One app. “Just to repeat: Be creative in how you back announce podcasts, but please avoid outright promotion.”

The move seems like a backward step for NPR. It’s understandable that some local stations would be fearful of podcasts, given that they potentially eat into their own listenership. But if the organisation has devoted resources to podcasting, it makes sense to cross-promote the two.

“We won’t tell people to actively download a podcast or where to find them. No mentions of npr.org, iTunes, Stitcher, NPR One, etc.”

In a statement to the Washingtonian, NPR spun the move a little differently: “People know how to find podcasts. It’s like when we talk of books on air: we mention the title and author, not the bookstore.” That might be true, but the analogy is a little off in this instance because NPR owns a so-called “bookstore.” It’s called NPR One — a novel mobile app that gives listeners a continuous stream of curated and personalised radio. As Turpin writes: “For now, NPR One will not be promoted on the air.”

It’s a strange stance. Many people know how to access a podcast, but a large portion of NPR’s readership — especially older listeners — might be unaware that NPR One exists. To increase the app’s user base, wouldn’t it make sense to promote the service to NPR listeners? After all, those are the people that are most likely to appreciate and recommend its efforts.

Via: NiemenLab

Source: NPR

LG agrees to build Bang & Olufsen’s pricey TVs

Even if you really love Danish design, $8,000 is insane for a 55-inch Bang & Olufsen 4K TV, since a superior OLED model from LG costs about three grand. B&O may have though the same thing, because it decided to outsource its television manufacturing to LG Electronics. While it’s still responsible for the design and acoustics, LG will take take over development and production, saving B&O 150 million kroner ($23 million) over three years. “We’ve been losing significant amounts of money on developing and building the TVs because we’re sub-scale.” CEO Tue Mantoni tells Bloomberg. “We make about 30,000 TVs a year and LG produces about 40 million.”

Bang & Olufsen is rumored to be mulling a sale to an unknown party, but hasn’t announced a deal yet. Despite that, the company announced a variety of products last year, including the A6 WiFi speaker, BeoLink Multiroom audio system and even a Bluetooth speaker. There are no details on what kind of TVs LG will build for the company, but we’d be disappointed if it was anything less than a motorized OLED 4K model oozing minimalist style.

Source: Reuters

SoundCloud inks deal with Sony Music as streaming service looms

Back in January, SoundCloud and Universal Music Group came to terms on a licensing deal and now the popular music site has inked another agreement. SoundCloud announced today that it has a deal in place with Sony Music Entertainment, which means that the company now has agreements will all three major labels. In late 2014, the audio repository revealed its licensing deal with Warner Music Group and added 20,000 indie labels last summer after hashing out royalty terms with Merlin.

SoundCloud set out to lock down licensing agreements after coming under scrutiny for hosting songs that violated copyright laws. The company has also discussed its plans to launch a streaming service multiple times. That was expected to happen in 2015, but details remains scarce on both features and an arrival date. The press release announcing the agreement with Sony Music mentions “the introduction of subscription services in the US and other markets later this year,” but declines to offer any further info. It’s possible that a pending deal with Sony was causing the delay, so we could be hearing official word on the subscription plans soon enough.

Source: SoundCloud

America accuses Iran of hacking the dam, cyber-squirrels rejoice

As cyber-geddon stories go, Middle Eastern countries hacking into US dams or power grids and making stuff go haywire sounds like the plot for a not-so-subtly racist Hollywood scare flick. But that’s the story we got when news outlets, citing unnamed sources, recently reported the Obama administration would be calling out Iranian hackers as the culprits behind a malicious 2013 breach at a New York dam.

Outlets reported at the time of the disclosure that hackers were “unable to get into the full dam system, but could take control of the flood gates.”

The news drama here hinges on reports that hackers accessed the dam’s floodgate controls. The Bowman Avenue Dam near Rye Brook, New York, whose only purpose is to mitigate flooding, does have a computer-operated sluice gate … er, it does now, anyway.

After the Department of Homeland Security approached the city of Rye about investigating the dam in 2013, Marcus Serrano, Rye city manager, told local press something that’s not making it into this week’s resurgence of stories about Iranian hackers. In local news outlet My Rye, Mr. Serrano said:

“In or about June 2013, a sluice gate was added to the Dam, in order to help control the flow of water and assist with flood mitigation during storm events. The gate was designed to be opened and closed via computer; however, despite a ribbon cutting ceremony, the gate was never fully operational, and remained non-functioning through the DHS investigation. In any event, based on information provided to us, at no time was the sluice gate ever manipulated by unauthorized users outside of the city.

Subsequent to and after taking certain security measures consistent with the DHS report, the City did implement the sluice gate for the first time during a storm event on or about April 30 to May 1, 2014.”

So the damn dam, which in this case was really more like an artist’s rendering of a dam, was operating at less than a minimum. The Iranian “cyberspies” who “had access to [the dam’s] control system” had it only in theory.

It seems like someone’s trying really hard to make Iranian hackers seem more dangerous than bird poop.

Bird poop shut down Indian Point nuclear plant https://t.co/HSkJIXzkPb – Westchester NY

— CyberSquirrel (@CyberSquirrel1) March 3, 2016

If it’s a contest, bird poop is kind of winning. But that’s nothing compared to the most significant and active threat to our nation’s industrial control management systems: sSquirrels.

In a July 2015 comment, John C. Inglis, former deputy director, National Security Agency, said, “I don’t think paralysis [of the electrical grid] is more likely by cyberattack than by natural disaster. And, frankly, the No. 1 threat experienced to date by the US electrical grid is squirrels.”

And he’s right. With our government’s increased focus on threats of cyberterrorist attacks on industrial control systems (like power grids), the data from the sardonic Cyber Squirrel Map proves that Iranian hackers have nothing on the leet haxxor skillz of those bushy-tailed little acorn-hoarding bastards.

To this effect, Cyber Squirrel 1 reminds its readers that “of all the claimed nation-state cyber attacks that have impacted critical infrastructure that we have been made aware of such as the Brazil Blackouts, German Steel Plant event, and the Ukrainian power outages only the US lead Stuxnet operation can be confirmed at this time. We are continuing to look into the December events in the Ukraine.”

When it comes to executing successful infrastructure attack ops, squirrels have any and all government-sponsored hackers beat by a mile. Late last year, the hacker behind Cyber Squirrel began collecting “all unclassified Cyber Squirrel Operations that have been released to the public that we have been able to confirm.”

Squirrel knocks out power of hundreds in Lee County https://t.co/vhukwO2Xyb – Lee County TX

— CyberSquirrel (@CyberSquirrel1) February 22, 2016

According to Cyber Squirrel, as of the beginning of March 2016, there have been 1,139 successful “cyber squirrel” attacks — though the running tally of ops is inclusive of all animals, including birds, rats, raccoons, and snakes.

It remains to be seen whether or not the Obama administration will finger Iranian hackers for the dam that wasn’t really hacked — and what sort of evidence, if any, we’ll get. Since someone’s playing the cyber-attribution blame game here, maybe it’s just that China and Russia got the week off.

Perhaps it’s part of the monster-of-the-week cybersecurity news roadshow, conveniently brought to us by a DHS that just might be desperately trying to look like it’s really doing stuff. The madness around this dam — the way it just doesn’t add up but feels part of the general cybersecurity mood right now — along with the Apple encryption mania, feels like a kind of hysteria in the air, one that news outlets seem to breathe in and catch.

Surely, this dam coming back into the news so circumspect with fact is a harbinger: The next Big Bad to be leveraged for scaring up both legislation and clicks will be the hacking of industrial control systems (and switches).

But the beauty of Cyber Squirrel at a time like this is that it’s all about perspective. That when it comes to domestic cybersecurity, authorities (and infosec) should be giving less attention to vague threats, and more to problems at home — like getting our infrastructure systems properly patched.

In the meantime, for whatever the hell happened (or not) at the Bowman Avenue Dam, my money’s on squirrels.

The next three-person ISS crew is about to leave Earth

Astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka have been selected as the crew for Expedition 47 on the International Space Station. They’re scheduled to take off for a six-month stay in orbit at 5:25 PM Eastern Friday. The trio will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz spacecraft and dock with the station roughly six hours later. You can watch the launch live at NASA Television starting at 4:30 PM Eastern.

This mission marks Williams’ third trip to the ISS and, by the time he returns, he will hold the record for total time in space — a whopping 534 days spent outside the Earth’s gravitational confines. The current 520-day record is held by astronaut Scott Kelly, who just got back from orbit at the start of the month.

Source: NASA

The Sulon Q has insane mixed reality ambitions

Earlier this week, Sulon Technologies unveiled the Sulon Q, which it claims is the world’s first tether-free all-in-one headset that combines AR, VR and spatial computing in a single device. That means that instead of attaching it to a computer, like the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive, or relying on a smartphone, like the Gear VR, the Q is a computer in and of itself — it even has a battery pack attached. Think of it as wearing a computer on your face. On top of that, it also has a multitude of sensors that promise real-time hand-tracking and environment mapping. It all seems a little far-fetched, which could explain why Sulon released a “Magic Beans” video to demo the tech (see below). We also took the opportunity to speak to Sulon CEO Dhan Balachand here at GDC 2016 and tried the (non-working) headset on our heads.

SULON Magic Beans Demo from Sulon Technologies on Vimeo.

In the aforementioned video, you’ll essentially see a recreation of Jack and the Beanstalk, but set in what appears to be an office. Balachand tells me that the Sulon maps the office in real-time, and is able to overlay the beanstalk imagery on top of what is essentially a video passthrough. But as the story progresses, you’ll see that the ceiling of the office suddenly opens up and a giant appears. The giant then picks you up and you find yourself dangling above. This is the part where AR essentially transitions and works in concert with VR, says Balachand.

“There’s a spatial processing unit inside,” he said. “It actually maps the world by itself and is not sensitive to sunlight or any lighting changes […] That’s innate within the system. That’s its heart.”

To reiterate, the Q is basically a standalone PC. It has an AMD FX-8800 chip processor on board and is overclocked to a boost load of around 3.4 GHz. Other specs include WiFi, Bluetooth, 256GB SSD storage and it even runs Windows 10. “Imagine a floating screen where you’d see a desktop of Windows 10,” said Balachand. “You’d be able to move applications around and start creating a virtual play area.” You can use your hands, but it will also apparently ship with a keyboard and mouse. There are two USB 3 ports at the bottom, a microHDMi output at the top plus a 3.5mm audio jack.

“Say you have a virtual ball and you use your physical leg to kick it,” said Balachand of the Sulon tech. “As you look at the ball, the leg is virtualized and it applies game physics to the ball, giving it curvature and kinematics. It bounces through the environment in real time. There’s no pre-mapping. It’s a virtualized version of the real world. That’s how this is unique.”

Sulon had a demo unit for me to try, but unfortunately it was not a working prototype. Still, I could at least have a feel for it — Balachand says that the unit I tried would be pretty close to the final unit in terms of size and weight. Overall, I thought the fit was nice and snug. There were velcro strips around the top and the sides for flexibility and it didn’t seem heavy at all. The battery pack located on the back of the headset is by far the heaviest part of the whole contraption, but even that didn’t weigh me down. I asked for specifics on battery life, but Balachand says they’re still working out the details on that.

On the whole, I have to say I’m pretty skeptical. I would definitely need to see it in action in order for me to believe that a small computer like this can handle all the processing load necessary to handle AR, VR and hand-tracking. Sulon says they’ll be shipping units in late Spring, so we won’t have long to wait to see if it’s reality or, like Jack and the Beanstalk, just a fairy tale.