Style, simplicity and sound perfection: XTC In-Ear Genuine Wood headphones
Despite all the bells and whistles of today’s headphones market, one technology has been in use for centuries from fine instruments to the acoustics-enhancing architecture of concert halls: high-quality wood.
The XTC In-Ear Genuine Wood Headphones fluidly combine premium sound reproduction and top-notch noise isolation for a superior, distortion-free sound in high-fidelity audio, as artists intended for you to hear it. For a limited time, you can grab a pair for just £16.42 ($23.99) from Pocket-lint Deals.
Skip the bulky brand-obsessed compromise on sound, and embrace the sleek style and durability of XTC In-Ear’s finely-crafted wood. The organic materials help to promote rich, natural acoustics. And unlike bulky over-ear headphones, in-ears typically cut corners on looks and sound quality — this is not the case with XTC. The XTC tips have a smooth wooden finish, giving them a mature sense of style while a sleek black nylon cable relieves the easily-tangled cheap plastic feel of most competitors.
A gold-plated 3.5mm audio jack provides uninterrupted, smooth sound while you enjoy XTC’s high-level noise isolation. You’ll love the clarity of sound and simple, elegant style of the XTC In-Ear Genuine Wood Headphones. Take 52 per cent off the retail cost for a limited time, and pay just £16.42 ($23.99) on Pocket-lint Deals.
The second ‘XCOM 2’ DLC pack arrives May 12th
The second DLC pack for XCOM 2 is set to drop on May 12th and will come bursting at the seams with new content like a Xenomorph cub desperately chewing its way to freedom. The new pack will cost $10 unless you’ve already picked up the Reinforcements Pack, in which case save your money because the new content is already on its way.
The biggest addition are the expansion’s three new Ruler aliens. These bosses will randomly hunt your team during campaigns (assuming you’ve cleared the new narrative sections already) and offer unique powers and tactics — they’ll even retreat if you don’t blast them fast enough. Luckily, players will have access to four new “prototype” weapons including a single shot rifle, a throwable axe, a pistol that automatically hides dead bodies and a freeze grenade to better battle these badass bosses. Additionally, players can pick up three new armor sets — each forged from the carcass of Ruler-class alien — that will send their extraterrestrial minions scurrying. The DLC will also include a smattering of bug fixes and gameplay rebalances.
Source: XCOM
‘Deadpool’ downloads are setting sales records early
Fox’s Digital HD plan to sell movies online ahead of their disc release appears to be paying off, as it just announced that CGI-heavy Deadpool is the fastest selling superhero digital HD movie. Of course, it being incredibly well-received doesn’t hurt, but racking up a million sales before the Ultra HD Blu-ray / Blu-ray / DVD debut next week is pretty nice. According to Fox, it’s the studio’s “best performing” movie ever under the program, which saw it go on sale via the likes of iTunes and Vudu on April 25th.
Another positive is that fans have a legit way to get the movie instead of trying to hold out while Blu-ray rips bounce around on torrents (cough — Star Wars: The Force Awakens). Of course, the Digital HD program could get better if it worked out a way for people to get the movie early and on disc later if they want it, but that’s just one more hiccup to solve.
Fox:
DEADPOOL SELLS 1 MILLION DIGITAL HD UNITS IN ITS FIRST WEEK, FASTER THAN ANY SUPERHERO MOVIE
Fox’s Best Performing Digital HD Title Ever
#1 R-Rated Title Through 1 Week
Fox’s Fastest Title to 1 Million
LOS ANGELES, Calif. (May 5, 2016) – DEADPOOL, the pop culture sensation and one of the highest grossing films of the year, is now the fastest selling superhero title on Digital HD, selling 1 million units its first week. It also now holds the record as Fox’s best performing Digital HD title ever, and the fastest to 1 million units.
Amazon offers NBC’s Seeso comedy service as a streaming add-on
NBC’s Seeso comedy streaming service has been available to all since January, and now Amazon Prime members are getting easy access. The online retailer added NBC’s lineup of comedy TV shows and movies, which includes new episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Myers the day after they air. You’ll have to shell out an extra $4/month for Seeso on top of that Prime subscription, but doing so puts the comedy library alongside your other Amazon videos.
This isn’t the first time Amazon has allowed Prime customers to tack on other video services to the subscription. It also lets users add Showtime, Comedy Central and others for folks who are willing to pay extra for those. If you’ll recall, Hulu is doing something similar by offering Showtime as an add-on to the regular streaming options. Putting all of those things in one spot certainly seems convenient, but Amazon will need to make that one-stop shop easier to use if it really wants to compete with the likes of Netflix and Hulu. But hey, at least there’s Saved by the Bell.
Source: Amazon
Russian provider casts doubt on email hacking claims
Yesterday, Reuters reported that tens of millions of email addresses and account passwords were stolen in an apparent data breach — but as is often the case, there’s more to this story than meets the eye. According to Motherboard, which spoke with both Hold Security (the company that received the data in question) and security expert Troy Hunt, it’s not at all clear that the email providers were hacked. It’s even possible this data isn’t legitimate.
For starters, Motherboard received a statement from Russian email provider Mail.ru, which accounted for 57 million accounts in the data release. The provider claims that after doing a sample check of the data, none of the email and password combinations work. This casts plenty of doubt on the legitimacy of the entire data set.
Furthermore, Alex Holden (CEO and founder of Hold Security) admitted that the data appeared to come from “a collection of different breaches.” Between this and the doubt that Mail.ru has cast on the legitimacy of the data, it’s entirely possible that the data in this “hack” is either quite old or didn’t come from the email providers directly — or both. Troy Hunt of “Have I Been Pwned” (a site that maintains a repository of data breeches) said to Motherboard: “You know how much effort we go to in trying to figure out if breaches are legit or not, it feels like that hasn’t happened here.”
As always, it’s good to practice good password hygiene and change them up frequently (and seriously, two-factor authentication!), but it’s also worth maintaining some perspective — if a company has large as Microsoft, Google or Yahoo was hit with a data breach affecting tens of millions of its customers, it would likely have made that knowledge publicly available. Absent any firm confirmation from those companies — as well as Mail.ru’s statement — it seems most users should be safe at the moment.
Source: Motherboard
Lyft and GM will test self-driving fleet within a year
General Motors and Lyft’s planned network of on-demand, self-driving taxis will begin testing in one undisclosed city sometime in the next year, the Wall Street Journal reports today. While the details of the plan are still scarce, the accelerated timeline will put a fleet of publicly available autonomous vehicles on the road ahead of either company’s major rivals in Silicon Valley.
Earlier this year, the Detroit automaker invested $500 million and secured a seat on the board of the ride-sharing service, with the goal of rapidly implementing their vision of a driverless taxi network. Back in March, GM also acquired San Francisco-based Cruise Automation to further speed up that goal. Prior to the acquisition, Cruise built aftermarket self-driving kits that could be added to several Audi vehicles for around $10,000.
The forthcoming fleet will use Chevy Bolt electric vehicles paired with Cruise’s self-driving technology. As a low-cost, long-range electric vehicle, the Bolt actually makes an ideal taxi platform with plenty of backseat legroom built into a compact profile. According to one Lyft executive quoted by the Journal, customers in the test market will be able to choose between a human driver or an autonomous vehicle when hailing a ride through Lyft’s app.
One major roadblock that remains for Lyft, GM and their competitors is the “patchwork” of rules governing autonomous vehicles at the state level. To head off any potential regulatory headaches, Ford, Google, Lyft, Uber and Volvo formed the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets last month to advocate for one set of federal laws and regulations around autonomous vehicles.
SpaceX doesn’t expect to stick the landing of tonight’s launch
Make a pot of coffee and curl up in your favorite bunny slippers tonight for another SpaceX rocket launch and attempted sea landing. The Falcon 9 rocket will take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 1:21AM ET on Friday, May 6th, carrying a Japanese communications satellite (JCSAT-14). It’s headed for a precariously high orbit, which makes re-entry and landing extra difficult. Still, SpaceX will attempt to set the rocket back down on the “Of Course I Still Love You” barge.
“The first-stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing unlikely,” SpaceX says.
SpaceX successfully landed a Falcon 9 at sea for the first time in April and it was an impressive sight. This week’s launch was originally scheduled to take place on Thursday, May 5th, but weather conditions prompted a one-day delay. As always, SpaceX is livestreaming the launch; watch it right here.
Source: @SpaceX
GoPro delays its Karma drone until this holiday
GoPro’s Karma drone was due out the first half of this year, but we’re already into the fifth month and it’s nowhere to be found. That’s because, according to the company’s latest financial statements, it’s been delayed. Surprise! The company now says that the Karma won’t hit until this holiday season. In the next six months, any number of things could happen. For instance, we said that AirDog — another follow-behind drone — was the company that GoPro needed to beat or buy when we checked it out earlier this year. That firm could possibly release a new model that blows the Karma out of the water by November.
The busiest shopping season of the year is six months away, but technology moves incredibly fast. Now GoPro could find itself in an unenviable position of being surpassed by cheaper competition, seeing how last we knew, the Karma was going to be priced between $500 and $1,000. The other possibility is that Karma could be outdated before it even hits the shelves. For GoPro’s sake, let’s hope that doesn’t happen — anything is possible in half-a-year’s time, though.
Source: GoPro
Immersion Files Second Haptic Feedback Lawsuit Against Apple
Immersion, a company that develops and licenses haptic touch feedback technology, today filed a second lawsuit against Apple and AT&T, accusing the MacBook and MacBook Pro of violating one patent and the iPhone 6s of violating three additional patents not mentioned in the original lawsuit.
According to Immersion, iPhone 6s and MacBook features like 3D Touch and the Force Touch trackpad infringe on its intellectual property. The four patents included in today’s lawsuit are as follows:
– U.S. Patent No. 8,749,507: “Systems and Methods for Adaptive Interpretation of Input from a Touch-Sensitive Input Device”
– U.S. Patent No. 7,808,488: “Method and Apparatus for Providing Tactile Sensations”
– U.S. Patent No. 8,581,710: “Systems and Methods for Haptic Confirmation of Commands”
– U.S. Patent No. 7,336,260: “Method and Apparatus for Providing Tactile Sensations”
The fourth patent is the one that Immersion accuses the MacBook, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the 15-inch MacBook Pro of violating, and AT&T, while named in the iPhone 6s claim, is not named in the MacBook infringement claim. According to Immersion, the Force Touch trackpad built into these products uses haptic feedback technology belonging to Immersion.
Apple’s Force Touch trackpad utilizes haptic feedback to mimic the feeling of pressing on a physical button. The trackpad is able to distinguish between a light press and a harder press, with the pressure-sensitivity used to enable different gestures.
In the original lawsuit filed in February of 2016, Immersion accused Apple and AT&T of infringing on three patents with the iPhone 6, 6s, 6 Plus, 6s Plus, Apple Watch, Apple Watch Sport, and Apple Watch Edition. Immersion has added AT&T to the lawsuit because AT&T sells Apple products and offers guides, directions, and other materials that “encourage and facilitate infringing use by others.”
Immersion’s patent lawsuit, in which the company requests a jury trial and seeks compensatory damages, is accompanied by a second complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission, seeking an inclusion order to prevent the sale of the accused Apple devices in the United States.
Tags: lawsuit, patents, Immersion
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Navigate your smartwatch by touching your skin
Smartwatches walk a fine line between functionality and fashion, but new SkinTrack technology from Carnegie Mellon University’s Future Interfaces Group makes the size of the screen a moot point. The SkinTrack system consists of a ring that emits a continuous high-frequency AC signal and a sensing wristband that goes under the watch. The wristband tracks the finger wearing the ring and senses whether the digit is hovering or actually making contact with your arm or hand, turning your skin into an extension of the touchscreen.
The tech is so precise that you’re able to use the back of your hand to dial a phone number, draw letters for navigation shortcuts, scroll through apps, play Angry Birds or select an item from a list. Researchers at the Future Interfaces Group say the tech is 99 percent accurate when it comes to touch.
“As our approach is compact, non-invasive, low-cost and low-powered, we envision the technology being integrated into future smartwatches, supporting rich touch interactions beyond the confines of the small touchscreen,” the creators write in a YouTube description.
This isn’t the first iteration of touch-skin technology, but it’s by far the most stylish and streamlined. We can already imagine the customizable “Apple Watch + SkinTrack ring” bundles.
Via: The Verge
AIVAnet 