‘Hamilton’ and ‘Star Wars’ collide in your dream jam session

Unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock for the last year or so, you’ve likely heard of the musical sensation Hamilton (16-time Tony nominee) and its creator / star Lin-Manuel Miranda. As it turns out, Miranda isn’t just an American history buff — he’s also a pretty serious Star Wars fan. He managed to squeeze time into his busy schedule last year to compose a song for The Force Awakens called “Jabba Flow,” heard in the cantina in Maz’s castle.

The song wasn’t included on the film’s official soundtrack, but in celebration of the marketing-fueled “May the fourth” Star Wars celebration, you can hear the tune Miranda composed and performed with director J.J. Abrams on the official Star Wars site today. You can also stream it on Apple Music or buy it on iTunes if you really need to own the short, odd ditty.

But Miranda took things a step further today. Last year, Miranda and various cast members and musicians would hold short, impromptu performances outside Hamilton’s theater. It was part of a phenomenon called #Ham4Ham at which lucky would-be attendees could win tickets to the show as part of a lottery. The lottery has since moved online, but today Miranda and Abrams performed “Jabba Flow” live for the assembled masses. Before performing the song, Miranda confirmed that the song was written in Huttese, the language of Jabba the Hut. “It translates as ‘no, lover lover, it wasn’t me,’ Miranda says in the middle of the video. “It’s literally a Shaggy intergalactic remix.”

Via: Mashable

Source: Hamilton the Musical (YouTube), iTunes, StarWars.com

Twitter for Mac lets you search for GIFs when a photo won’t do

Twitter launched a handy GIF search tool inside its mobile apps back in February, and now the social network is bring the animated images to the desktop. With an update to the Mac software, users can expect to quickly find an appropriate GIF for the situation, so long as you’re using the official Twitter application. The image search looks similar to the mobile version, where clicking the “GIF” button from the compose window brings up a smattering of categories. Of course, there’s an old-fashioned search bar too, if you have something specific in mind.

In addition to GIFs, Twitter’s Mac app also supports polls, so you can easily pose a question to the masses from the comforts of your desktop. The curated Moments feature made the leap from mobile as well, keeping you up to speed on what’s trending and other newsy bits. If you’re computer hasn’t already alerted you to the update, or you’re looking to give the app a try for the first time, you can nab the most recent version from the Mac App Store now.

Source: Mac App Store

Siri Creators Debuting New AI Assistant ‘Viv’ Next Week

Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, co-founders of Siri, the virtual assistant now built into all of Apple’s iOS devices, are set to demonstrate their newest artificial intelligence project on Monday, reports The Washington Post. Viv, the name of the AI bot, is more advanced than Siri and is able to carry out complex tasks by mimicking the “spontaneity and knowledge base” of a human assistant.

Viv can, for example, set up a dinner reservation and purchase movie tickets all based on one query, parsing ticket prices to find deals and offering suggestions if a movie is sold out or a restaurant has no seating available. Completing the same task with Siri would require multiple commands and human interaction. In an example given by The Washington Post, the Viv team uses it to order pizzas from a nearby restaurant, with Viv parsing numerous voice-based topping and side dish orders without ever needing to open an app.

Image via The Washington Post
Much of Viv’s functionality is enabled through integration with third-party apps like Uber, Florist One, SeatGuru, ZocDoc, and Grubhub, similar to Amazon’s Alexa. The team behind Viv is in talks to bring on more partners and plans bring the Viv technology to a variety of Internet-connected devices like cars and TVs.

Grubhub chief executive Matt Maloney said he rushed to sign up with Viv two years ago, impressed with the idea of allowing consumers to perform different activities without having to toggle between services. “No one has been able to say, ‘I want the movie ticket, and the bottle of wine, and some flowers on the side’ — all in one breath,” he said.

The goal with Viv, according to Kittlaus, is to offer a way for humans to interact naturally with services through complex human-to-human style conversations, a project Kittlaus and Cheyer have been pursuing since before the development of Siri.

Siri was built around the same premise, but underwent changes under Apple’s leadership. “Steve [Jobs] had some ideas about the first version, and it wasn’t necessarily aligned with all the things that we were doing,” Kittlaus told The Washington Post.

Google and Facebook have already made offers to purchase Viv, but it is not clear if Kittlaus and Cheyer have plans to sell the technology. The Viv Labs team wants to see the technology built into a wide range of devices, and Kittlaus says the company will “pick the path that gets us there.”

Tags: Siri, Viv
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Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator is the Korean manufacturer’s latest and boldest attempt at selling us on the smart fridge. With a 21.5-inch touchscreen on the door and cameras on the inside that keep watch over your leftovers, it’s arguably the smartest — and inarguably the smartest-looking — smart fridge to date.

And with a retail price starting at $5,600 (or $6,000 for a counter-depth model in black stainless steel like the one seen here) it’s the most expensive one yet, too. It isn’t available outside of the US yet like some of Samsung’s other four-door fridges, but that starting price comes out to roughly £3,900 or AU$7,500.

However you convert it, $6,000 is a hell of a lot to spend on a fridge, even one that looks as nice as this one does. Take the Samsung RF32FMQDBSR, for instance. It offers the same, attractive four-door build, the same luxurious recessed handles, and the same “Flex Zone” in the bottom right quadrant that you can dial between fridge and freezer settings — all for at least two thousand bucks less than the Family Hub fridge. The only differences between the two? The touchscreen, the cameras and the admittedly slick-looking black stainless steel finish.

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So here’s the basic question with this thing: Is that king-sized touchscreen (and the smarts that go with it) really worth the two thousand-dollar upcharge? Is this the fridge of the future, or a fridge too far?

To find out, we installed the Family Hub Refrigerator in the CNET Smart Home’s kitchen. We’ll save our full review for after we get our hands on a full production model. For now, here are our first impressions after spending about a week with a pre-production unit.

Chris Monroe/CNET

It’s gorgeous

No surprise, here. Stylistically, Samsung knows it has a good thing going with its “Four-Door Flex” refrigerators, and with the dark finish and the eye-catching touchscreen, the Family Hub Fridge is the best-looking one yet.

The Tizen-powered touchscreen is well-organized and striking to look at, too, especially when it cycles through your photo collection. It’s a dramatic difference from Samsung’s previous smart fridges, where the touchscreens were comparably puny. Turns out size matters — but, that said…

A $2,000 touchscreen it ain’t

Let’s get one thing clear: Samsung didn’t just slap a tablet onto the front of this fridge. That’s too generous a way of putting it. Tablets are personal and customizable, and they fill a wide variety of roles for a wide variety of users. The Family Hub fridge’s touchscreen is just an interface, and one that’s designed for the specific purpose of allowing you to interact with the refrigerator’s smart features, the same way that an ATM’s touchscreen is an interface designed to help you withdraw money from your bank account.

Samsung didn’t just slap a tablet onto the front of this fridge. That’s too generous a way of putting it.

You can’t download extra apps onto this thing. You can’t rearrange the apps that are already there, or change the way the screen looks. You can’t switch the home screen to default to a full-screen view of your family calendar, or to the latest images of the inside of the fridge. Good looks aside, it’s still just an interface, not a personal computing device.

That applies to the feel of the thing, too, specifically the touch controls. While they’re definitely a big improvement over the sluggish touchscreens found on the smart fridges of yesterday, they’re nowhere near what you’d expect from a current-gen tablet. You have to type carefully, and you have to be sure you don’t stray into the sizable bezel, where the screen loses track of your finger altogether. Try drawing a simple picture or signing your name in the whiteboard app, and you’ll see just how limited the touch resolution is. I can’t imagine comfortably writing much more than “hi mom” on it.

The drag-and-drop expiration date icons are fairly ingenious.

Chris Monroe/CNET

The cameras might surprise you

Fridge-cams might seem gimmicky. All right, fine. They are gimmicky. But to my surprise, this gimmick is growing on me.

There’s three of them built into the refrigerator’s “mullion,” the strip of material that flaps shut between the doors whenever you close them. Each time you do, they snap a picture of the interior. Tap the “View Inside” button on the fridge’s screen, or open up the Samsung Smart Home app on your phone, and you’ll be able to check the latest picture. Samsung pitches it as a handy way of checking whether or not you need more orange juice or whatever while you’re out at the grocery.

Using your smart fridge to track ingredients finally makes sense.

That seemed to me like the sort of feature that would come in handy maybe once or twice a year, and I didn’t blame anybody for scoffing at the sound of it. But that “View Inside” feature has one other trick up its sleeve: little drag-and-drop icons that keep track of when things in the fridge will go bad.

It’s easy to use, and a huge improvement from the ingredient-tracking capabilities of previous smart refrigerators, where you had to manually type in the details of the stuff you wanted to track. After all, if you really cared, you might as well just type those details into the notes app on your phone. Now, with the cameras in play, using your smart fridge to track ingredients finally makes sense — although you’ll need to make a habit of putting things back in the same spot, because the icons won’t follow ingredients around if you move them.

The smarts are hit and miss

Beyond the “View Inside” mode, you’ll find a web browser, an app that can mirror the feed from your Samsung smart TV, the Instacart and Groceries by Mastercard apps for getting ingredients delivered to your door, and an app called Sticki that syncs up your family’s calendars into a shared, color-coded fridge calendar. I liked it, especially because it didn’t force me to make a new calendar in a weird, new app — I could just select events and meetings from my existing Google Calendar to show up on the fridge. Seems pretty handy for a busy family.

I also liked how easy it was to stream music or Internet radio using Pandora or TuneIn. The speakers are nothing special, but they’re “good for a fridge,” which is to say good enough for casual kitchen listening. If you want something that sounds better, you can sync the fridge up with external speakers via Bluetooth. I suppose that’s a nice option, but I think I’d rather just get an Amazon Echo for the kitchen if it mattered that much to me.

Speaking of which, where is Alexa? When Samsung first pitched this fridge, the first and biggest bullet point on the press release was that it would be an Alexa-enabled device, with Amazon’s voice-powered virtual assistant built right in. Then, at CES, Samsung backed off on the Alexa claims, saying it was really just more of a possibility for down the line.

Nothing has changed since then (except the price, which Samsung has bumped up from $5,000). Despite the fact that the fridge has speakers, a microphone and an Internet connection, and seems like an especially good fit for Alexa’s hands-free music streaming, kitchen timers and unit conversions, there’s still no sign of her. That’s a distinct disappointment, and a bit of a head scratcher given that we’re already starting to see Alexa pop up in third-party devices from much smaller manufacturers. If they can make it work, why can’t Samsung?

Chris Monroe/CNET

Final thoughts (for now)

I get it. This smart fridge looks exponentially better and more futuristic than any other smart fridge ever made. Yes, it’s expensive — too expensive to be a realistic option for most of us — but I don’t think that’s really the point.

The point is that nobody wanted the smart fridges of yesterday. That’s the challenge Samsung and other appliance-makers must answer in order to capitalize on the smart homes of tomorrow. It sounds obvious, but they need to start making smart large appliances that people actually want. For now, at least, that means pulling out all of the stops and essentially producing their category’s version of a concept car. You’re almost certainly not going to buy it, but if it catches your attention and makes you want it, then it’s done its job.

So, that just leaves one question — do you want this thing?

Watch the new trailer for Fallout 4’s massive Far Harbor expansion pack

Fallout 4’s Far Harbor has just been given a new trailer and release date.

Fallout 4 is developed and published by Bethesda. It’s the fifth installment in the Fallout series and was released worldwide last November for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC. In February, Bethesda revealed that new add-on packs called Automatron, Wasteland Workshop, and Far Harbor were in the works. The first pack, Automatron, arrived in March for $10, followed by the $5 Wasteland Workshop expansion in April.

Now, the biggest of three DLCs, Far Harbor, is set to release 19 May for $25. It’s the most expensive add-on but involves the Valentine Detective Agency sending players to an island near Maine to look for a woman and a hidden colony of Synths. Bethesda said that Far Harbor has the largest landmass of any Bethesda add-on ever. So, to promote the launch, it released a trailer as well as the following description for Far Harbor: 

“In Far Harbor, a new case from Valentine’s Detective Agency leads you on a search for a young woman and a secret colony of synths. Travel off the coast of Maine to the mysterious island of Far Harbor, where higher levels of radiation have created a more feral world. Navigate through the growing conflict between the synths, the Children of Atom, and the local townspeople. Will you work towards bringing peace to Far Harbor, and at what cost?”

Far Harbor is set in a post-apocalyptic version of Maine’s Bar Harbor. It is expected to be bigger than the Shivering Isles expansion released for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, as it will also bring new faction quests, settlements, creatures, dungeons, armor, and weapons. All this content will sell for $25 but is included with the $50 DLC pass, which you can read about from here.

Bethesda has also teased that more add-ons will arrive later this year. If you bought the Fallout 4 DLC pass, you will receive those expansions.

KFC-flavored nail polish gives new meaning to ‘chicken fingers’

KFC is taking its “finger lickin’ good” slogan a bit too far. The fried chicken fast food chain made two “edible” fingernail polishes for its fans in Hong Kong. Teaming up with ad agency Ogilvy & Mather and food experts at McCormick, two shades were created that incorporate the restaurant’s top secret blend of 11 herbs and spices: Original Recipe and Hot & Spicy.

“To use, consumers simply apply and dry like regular nail polish, and then lick — again and again and again,” KFC explained.

While this is obviously a well-planned ad campaign to boost the brand in one of its Asian markets, KFC really did make this nail polish. It’s not making the product widely available, but the company did show off packaging in recent weeks. KFC also made a music video that focuses on the products without any actual fried chicken, and invites customers in Hong Kong to cast a vote on their favorite color flavor. Perhaps if things go well, the chain will develop a Nashville Hot Chicken version for habitual finger lickers in the US. We’re crossing our chicken fingers.

Source: AdWeek

CIA and NSA doubled their searches for Americans’ data in 2 years

So much for US intelligence scaling back its curiosity in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks. An Office of the Director of National Intelligence transparency report has revealed that the CIA and NSA doubled the number of searches for the content of Americans’ communications in an NSA database between 2013 and 2015. Where the two agencies made about 2,100 such requests three years ago, they searched 4,672 times last year. Just what triggered the spike isn’t clear. There’s a chance that some of the increase comes from repetitive searches (that is, running similar queries more than once), but they were also factors in 2013 — the odds are that activity went up.

There was a similar spike in searches for more abstract information, too. The NSA searched for metadata (details like names and dates, but not content) 9,500 times in 2013, and 23,800 times two years later.

The worry, as The Intercept notes, is that these intelligence-gathering outfits are making greater use of a power they shouldn’t even have. While the National Intelligence Director’s Office has contended that these searches are legal because that information was collected legally, critics say that this amounts to warrantless access to very sensitive information. Also, this report doesn’t account for FBI searches. It’s possible that the bureau conducted many more searches that aren’t on the radar. You may not get better answers until the Director provides an estimate for the number of people swept up in US surveillance efforts.

Via: The Intercept, The Verge

Source: Office of the Director of National Intelligence

Bell paves way for higher prices across Canada with MTS deal

Things are going to get worse before they get better.

In many cities across Canada, the announcement that BCE Inc. had purchased MTS, Manitoba’s largest wireless provider, was met with a resounding shrug. Why should it matter to those in Ontario, Alberta or British Columbia that the name on their bill will soon change for a million people in the middle of the country?

Simply, because MTS has traditionally undercut the Big Three — Rogers, Telus and Bell — in its native province, forcing the companies to offer rates often 50% less than those in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. For example, Bell’s 10GB share plan in Manitoba costs $80; the same deal goes for $150 in Ontario.

Those discrepancies are familiar to the have-nots, the millions of wireless customers clambering for a compromise between fast networks and lower prices. In provinces with so-called regional incumbents, such as Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the local players were given ample time and investment to establish footholds as utilities long before national wireless carriers were established.

There are millions of wireless customers clambering for a compromise between fast networks and lower prices

The success of MTS and SaskTel, Saskatchewan’s Crown-owned carrier with a similar suppressing impact on wireless prices, motivated the previous federal government to establish a policy whereby four wireless providers would compete in every province in the country. It all but chose Wind Mobile to be that alternate, setting aside ample spectrum in recent wireless spectrum auctions for the company to use to establish an LTE network, which it is building with parent company Shaw’s assistance.

But now that MTS is set to be dissolved into BCE Inc., renamed Bell MTS and housing Bell Mobility’s Western headquarters, the former government’s policy will likely be undermined. In removing MTS and its impact, Bell is able to reset prices and expectations for the million-plus customers who rely on the regional carrier’s extensive LTE network — a network it built with Rogers to facilitate high-capacity LTE in large cities like Winnipeg and Brandon, and far-reaching signals in more rural parts of the province.

Alongside the acquisition, Bell promises to invest $1 billion into Manitoba’s telecom infrastructure, bringing ultra-fast LTE-Advanced to wireless customers, along with fiber-to-the-home network to facilitate home internet and Fibe TV. But such window dressing masks the insidious nature of this slow undermining of what remains one of the few truly competitive markets in the country, leaving Saskatchewan as the sole province for which $80 for 10GB is attainable.

Beholden to shareholders, Rogers, Telus, and Bell have established Herculean networks of integrated wireless, wireline, television, internet, content creation and distribution.

Canadians have long sought alternatives to the Big Three and their high prices. Beholden to shareholders, Rogers, Telus, and Bell have established Herculean networks of integrated wireless, wireline, television, internet, content creation and distribution, with the telecom regulator reticent to establish limits on pricing lest it disturb a free market. And while it can’t be denied that Canadians enjoy some of the fastest, most reliable and modern networks in the world, the cost per gigabyte on the average mobile plan has actually risen over the past three years, bucking trends all over the world. By eliminating MTS from the fray, Bell is able to reinforce its dominance and, worse, retroactively paint almost the entire country with the same pricing brush.

To Bell, spending upwards of $4 billion to purchase MTS is likely far more about establishing a foothold in the West to take on Shaw, which, now that it has Wind Mobile, is gunning for the Big Three in a big way. But whether it will be possible for Shaw to make money in mobile by using the same undercutting tactics that kept MTS in business for so long remains to be seen — if Shaw even wants to do that in the first place.

There is competition in the Canadian wireless market. It just doesn’t result in lower prices.

That there is no competition in the Canadian wireless market is a misnomer; carriers compete voraciously for customers, quarter after quarter. That competition, however, comes at the expense of price drops, instead of fuelling them, as is the case in so many other countries. Canada’s lack of a healthy MVNO market — or practically any MVNO market — exacerbates the problem, since it forces companies to invest billions infrastructure, often up front, before becoming viable players in the wireless space. Such is the dominance of Rogers, Telus, and Bell.

Now that MTS is fading, and its impact on the Manitoba market with it, the highly-consolidated Canadian wireless market has to contend with even less choice in how we increasingly connect, often exclusively, to the internet.

YouTube said to be cooking up a streaming TV service of its own

A new report claims that Google’s YouTube division is working on an internet-based cable TV service called “Unplugged”. The service could be a rival for Dish Network’s Sling TV and the upcoming effort from Hulu, among others.

According to Bloomberg:

The project, for which YouTube has already overhauled its technical architecture, is one of the online video giant’s biggest priorities and is slated to debut as soon as 2017, one of the people said. YouTube executives have discussed these plans with most major media companies, including Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal, Viacom Inc., Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. and CBS Corp., but have yet to secure any rights, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private.

The report adds that Google has been developing this service since 2012, but the company has been working harder on it in the past few months. Google launched its no-ad video subscription option, YouTube Red, in 2015. The service, which also includes a number of exclusive shows and films, costs $9.99 a month with a 30 day free trial.

Millions of Gmail accounts said to be impacted by data breach

A Russian hacker is apparently claiming to have obtained hundreds of millions of login credentials for various email services. While the single-largest set of data appears to have come from Mail.ru, details from millions of Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo accounts are said to be part of the breach.

The data breach was uncovered by Hold Security, according to Reuters:

After eliminating duplicates, Holden said, the cache contained nearly 57 million Mail.ru accounts – a big chunk of the 64 million monthly active email users Mail.ru said it had at the end of last year. It also included tens of millions of credentials for the world’s three big email providers, Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo, plus hundreds of thousands of accounts at German and Chinese email providers.

In total, it appears that 40 million Yahoo Mail credentials were compromised, along with 33 million Microsoft accounts, and almost 24 million from Gmail. Thousands of these accounts are said to belong to employees of major U.S. companies.

Now might be a good time to change your password, and perhaps enable two-step authentication for your accounts.