Kodak’s having another stab at a smartphone, maybe high-end this time?
Kodak is teasing a new smartphone it is planning to unveil on 20 October. And yep, you’re probably thinking exactly the same as us when we first found out.
The company has a Kodak Phones Twitter account and posted a picture of what looks to be a Kodak-branded shutter or on/off button and just the date. No further clues can be gleaned.
Coming Soon… pic.twitter.com/H9SkF8mPeZ
— Kodak Phones (@KodakPhones) October 5, 2016
Even its website at kodakphones.com has been taken over by the teaser.
But as amazing as this might sound, it’s not even the first phone from the camera brand. That was the Kodak IM5 Smartphone, which was announced in January during CES in Las Vegas and was eventually sold in the Netherlands for around €280.
For that money you couldn’t expect high-end specs – the IM5 had a 5-inch 720p display and a 1.7GHz octa-core Mediatek MT6592 processor – but it was made by Bullitt Mobile, the same company that builds the rugged Cat phones.
Whether this latest handset will be manufactured by the same OEM source is unknown. It does look a tad higher end however, thanks to the aluminium surround. We’ll know more on 20 October when all will be revealed.
Gears of War set for the bright lights of Hollywood as movie production starts
Universal Pictures has given the go ahead for a Gears of War movie, with Scott Stuber and Dylan Clark onboard to produce the film. Stuber was involved with the Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart movie Central Intelligence while Clark is a producer on the new Planet of the Apes movies, so that’s some pretty decent backing.
- Gears of War 4 play through video shows the first 20 minutes of the game, watch it here
As for who will be portraying Gears’ COG soldiers isn’t yet clear, although we think Dwayne Johnson could indeed be a viable candidate as Marcus Fenix.
Gears of War 4 is the first new Gears game released since Microsoft bought Epic Games and formed new development team, The Coalition. It places you back on the planet Sera to fight off a different, suped-up Locust Horde; who have been gestating beneath the planet’s surface.
It’s not the first time a Gears of War movie has been attempted; the Hollywood Reporter says that New Line Cinema had plans to release its own adaptation of the game series. Unfortunately that time around, the rights ended up lapsing and the idea was shelved, until Stuber picked it up again in 2013.
- Gears of War 4 in 4K preview: Played on an Nvidia GTX 1070 notebook
- This the 2TB Xbox One S to get right now: Gears of War 4 Limited Edition
The project is still looking for a writer, so it will be some time before we see the film hit the big screen, but the fact a Gears movie looks promising has us eagerly waiting with anticipation. Until then, you can get your Gears of War fix next Tuesday 11 October when GoW 4 is released.
Six reasons to have the Probox2 Air Android TV box in your home
When it comes to home entertainment, especially the new wave of 4K-enabled products, it gets pretty expensive to kit out your home with equipment. And if you’re in a home with multiple screens, it’s even more so.
The Probox2 is the latest Android-based TV box to hit the market and has a great number of features to at least tempt you to consider stumping up the cash to get quality visuals in all your rooms.
1 – Android apps
Probox2 equipped the latest TV box with a skinned version of Android 6.0. That means, underneath the simple user interface designed for use on TVs is a platform which is supported by millions of apps and games. You can download any app or game you would on your Android phone, and have it play directly on your big screen at home.
Whether that means playing your favourite racing games, or just watching Netflix, you can do it all without having to get invested in a new platform or a new company’s services.
With that said, it also runs KODI 16.0, which is essentially a one-stop repository for multiple video sources like Apple Trailers, Vevo, Sky Sports and many more.
2 – Fits anywhere
One of the great things about the Probox2 Air, is that it doesn’t take up a lot of space, so you put it virtually anywhere. It’s a similar size to the 3rd generation Apple TV, perhaps slightly slimmer, and has been designed in Sweden to offer a minimalist, attractive style.
It’ll fit well next to your secondary TVs in your kitchen or bedroom, or just slide next to the other media players you have in your lounge, without any trouble.
3 – 4K HDR compatible
Probox2 Air supports a number of video and audio playback formats including full HD 1080p at 60 frames per second and Dolby/DTS 5.1 and 7.1 surround. But perhaps the most vital is 4K HDR support.
The Android TV box supports 4K playback up to 60 frames per second, and can play HDR content, to ensure that if you have the latest high-end television, you won’t be disappointed by the image quality.
What’s more, because it has microSD card support, you can load any media on to a little memory card, and have it show up on your TV.
Probox
4 – Beam any content from your phone
As well as giving you the ability to stream content directly on the box, or playing media from a memory card, you can use Miracast technology to beam from your phone.
Using Miracast technology you can AirPlay content from your iPhone to your screen, or Cast from your Android device.
5 – Extremely affordable
At just £62.00, the Probox2 Air is great value for money. It ships with a standard remote and HDMI cable in the box, or you can spend £20 more to get the version with the “Remote+” which is essentially a gamepad-style controller.
This Remote+ can be used as a standard remote for navigating the screen, or you can use it sideways where the gamepad controls and built-in gyroscopic sensors allow you to play games as you would on your console, or phone.
Probox
6 – Remote+
To maximize the best user experience, the Probox2 comes with the Remote+ controller. Remote+ is an unique tailor-made media remote controller with Fly mouse function, Gyroscope, Gaming pad, builtin microphone and directional pad for easy navigation in media applications like the Kodi / XBMC and is designed to make things even easier.
Specs
Stepping away from features and on to specs for a second, the Probox2 Air has plenty to offer. It supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi with support for 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels as well as Bluetooth 4.0.
Powering the entire system is a quad-core 2GHz processor paired with 2GB RAM, with 16GB built-in storage.
If that doesn’t seem like enough capacity, remember, it comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow preloaded so that you can take advantage of the software’s adoptable storage feature. That means you can insert a microSD card and format it to act as internal storage for all your apps and games.
It has two USB ports, an HDMI 2.0b port, ethernet port and an optical port alongside the external Wi-Fi antenna designed to offer improved signal and wireless performance.
If you’re sold, you can grab the Probox2 Air from Amazon in the UK.
Stanford simulator predicts brain swelling to guide surgeons
Surgeons have been cutting out parts of the skulls of patients suffering from brain trauma for a very long time. But a new simulation tool developed by a team of researchers for Stanford U and the University of Oxford will help make the procedure a lot safer. Decompressive craniectomy, as the method is called, gives the swelling brain space to expand in order to save a person’s life after a head injury. However, it could also lead to complications. See, when the brain bulges out of a hole, its axons (or the fragile threadlike parts of its nerve cells) have the tendency to stretch and break. This tool can minimize potential complications by telling surgeons the optimal place to cut and how large the hole should be, depending on the type of injury.
To develop the tool, the team studied medical scans showing the amount of swelling for different types of brain injuries. They then created mathematical estimates that can predict how an injury would affect different parts of the organ. Once they were done designing the system, then ran different scenarios through the simulation and found that you’ll see serious damage if axons expand near or above 30 percent. The resulting simulation, by the way, displays the most affected parts of the brain in red, areas that sustained mild damage in green and safe parts in blue. This gives surgeons a very visual guide to decide the best place to perform the decompressive craniectomy.
The team knows their creation is in its very early stages, and they’re hoping that surgeons could pitch in and help them develop it further. For now, you can read more about their study on Physical Review Letters, or watch the video below.
Source: Stanford University
NYT: Yahoo reworked its malware scanner for email surveillance
Following a Reuters report that in 2015 Yahoo scanned customer emails for US surveillance, the New York Times has followed up with details from anonymous sources of its own. Although Yahoo responded a day later claiming the initial report was “misleading,” the NYT sourced unnamed government officials claiming the company modified a system used to scan all incoming email for malware that stored matching messages and made them available to the FBI.
In this version of the events, Yahoo was responding to a court order under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that governs the PRISM program exposed by Edward Snowden’s leaks. Although it’s unclear exactly what they were looking for, the court order targeted code believed to be used “uniquely” by a foreign terrorist organization.
Reuters has followed up with another report of its own covering similar details. Citing unnamed former Yahoo employees, it says security staff disabled the program when they found it, and it had not been re-enabled before former top security officer Alex Stamos left the company for Facebook last year. It also noted a statement from Senator Ron Wyden, expressing concern that the NSA may have expanded its targeting under Section 702 from email addresses and other identifiers to other content without notifying the public.
Yahoo declined to provide further details on the program or what details of the initial report were misleading, but between these revelations and news of a massive 2014 security breach, this probably isn’t over yet.
Source: New York Times, Reuters
Cult classic ‘Voodoo Vince’ returns to Xbox next year
Voodoo Vince is coming back. The quirky platformer set in New Orleans and starring a voodoo doll who inflicts pain on himself to hurt enemies (because voodoo) started life on the first Xbox. But because it was an Xbox exclusive not many people played it despite how vocal its fans were. That was in 2003 when Microsoft was publishing just about anything in an effort to build a software library, regardless of how small the new console’s install base was.
As it turns out, the game wouldn’t work as a backwards compatible title on Xbox 360 due to “some convoluted custom code.” So for the past few months, Kauzlaric has been tinkering away at Voodoo Vince: Remastered. As you might expect, when the game comes out in “early 2017” for Windows 10 and Xbox One, it’ll run in 1080p at 60 FPS, support widescreen TVs and have overhauled graphics. But altering much else would be sacrilege, it sounds like.
While the Xbox team’s publishing strategy has changed pretty dramatically since then (Gears of War! Forza! Halo!), lead developer, and current creative director of first party publishing at Microsoft, Clayton Kauzlaric hasn’t forgotten about his team’s first 3D platformer. Over on Xbox Wire, he recounts the development period and the 13 years that’ve passed since the game hit retail.
“The gameplay is mostly untouched though, that was important to me,” Kauzlaric writes. “Vince moves, animates and controls exactly like he did in 2003. You can just see a lot more detail in his world when he moves through our twisted version of New Orleans ad the Bayou.”
And the project already has a high profile fan: Xbox chief Phil Spencer. For years he’s said that it’s his favorite game because of who he was playing it with when it first came out.
“I have two daughters, they’re 19 and 16 now, but there’s a game called Voodoo Vince that was the first game I finished with my youngest daughter on my lap and my oldest daughter next to me,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2015. “We were all kind of solving the puzzles together. For me, games are about the memories as much as the accomplishments. So I’ll always remember finishing [it] with my daughters.”
So, Blinx: The Timesweeper fans, there’s still hope that your favorite game starring a time-controlling feline could get another life.
So great, I’m already playing, special memories. Announcing Voodoo Vince: Remastered, Coming Early 2017 https://t.co/wxrxO06XXG
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) October 5, 2016
Source: Xbox Wire
‘Skyrim,’ ‘Fallout 4’ to offer user mods and PS4 Pro support
Bethesda and Sony have kissed and made up. Who benefits from that corporate make-out session? You, because mod support is en route for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition, according to a post on Bethesda.net. Skyrim mods will show up first, but there isn’t a timetable for when that will actually happen.
“We are excited to finally get modding to our PlayStation fans who have supported us for so long,” the post reads. “Modding has been an important part of our games for over 10 years, and we hope to do even more in the coming year for all our players, regardless of platform.”
However despite that ambiguity, when the remaster launches on October 28th it will run at native 4K resolution on the PlayStation 4 Pro — just a bit ahead of the console’s November 10th release date. If you’re planning to roam the irradiated Commonwealth in Fallout 4 with all the benefits PS4 Pro offers, you’re going to have to wait a bit. Bethesda teases that 4K rendering along with better lighting and graphics are planned for Fallout 4, but that those won’t arrive until work is finished on Skyrim.
If you were hoping for dragon-replacing, flying My Little Ponies, it sounds like your luck’s run out: Any mods can only use pre-existing assets from the games. Meaning, you can only make stuff with what’s already available in the base game. It effectively neuters a vast majority of either game’s more hilarious user creations like wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage replacing Fallout 4’s towering Deathclaw enemies, among others.
Source: Bethesda
CIA claims it can predict some social unrest up to 5 days ahead
Back in March 2015, the CIA chief began setting up a new office, the Directorate of Digital Innovation, to integrate the latest tech into the agency’s data-gathering workflow along with boosting the country’s cyber defense. According to its director, the department has helped the CIA as a whole improve its “anticipatory intelligence.” Speaking at the Next Tech event yesterday, Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Andrew Hallman noted that, in some instances, they’ve been able to forecast social unrest and societal instability in other countries by as much as three to five days out.
That “anticipatory intelligence” has been boosted through a combination of algorithms and analytics to predict the flow of illicit goods or extremists, according to Defense One. Deep and machine learning makes sense of seemingly disparate data, helping analysts see patterns to anticipate national security threats. And then they apply it to the world.
“What we’re trying to do within a unit of my directorate is leverage what we know from social sciences on the development of instability, coups and financial instability, and take what we know from the past six or seven decades and leverage what is becoming the instrumentation of the globe,” Hallman said during yesterday’s event.
They don’t just pore through the intelligence community’s own proprietary information, either. The Digital Innovation department has been using more and more open source data sets with specialists who can combine public and agency information to draw more nuanced conclusions, which CIA director John Brennan called a tremendous advantage.
Combined with their increasing surveillance of social media, the agency is clearly looking to gobble up as much information as possible. With tech’s best data-parsing tools, they hope to get days of lead time to prepare for riots and social decay across the globe. But how successful they are and how far ahead they can accurately anticipate it is uncertain.
Source: Defense One
‘Pokémon Go’ will add catch bonuses to make the grind worthwhile
As Niantic Labs keeps tweaking things to hold onto its Pokémon Go player base, it has revealed another new feature coming to the augmented reality game. Currently, player activities like catching Pokémon can level them up towards earning medals that toss off points, but not much else. Soon, there will be a catch bonus for earned medals that level up based on the type of Pokémon caught.
It seems like a way to make low-level grinding (perhaps with that $35 Pokémon Go Plus dongle) pay off visibly and as the post title puts it, increase the odds of catching rare Pokémon. The only problem? At least judging by the responses, players are really looking for ways to improve other parts of the game, like tracking monsters, or battling and training in gyms. Niantic previously said it would “rebalance” training battles, but that is apparently also still in the works.
Source: Pokémon Go
How to search Safari tabs in iOS 10 – CNET
In its latest operating system, Apple has lifted the limit on the number of tabs you can have open in Safari. The previous limit was 36 tabs in iOS 9. With iOS 10, you can, in theory, open an unlimited number of tabs for your browsing pleasure. In practice, the limit is somewhat less than infinity because your device’s processor and memory will eventually surrender, but you can definitely open many more than 36.
Keeping track of dozens of open tabs on a desktop computer is difficult, and it’s even more of a chore on an iPhone or iPad, devices with smaller screens and no physical keyboards. Thankfully, in iOS 10 there’s a way to search for a specific tab.
The feature is somewhat hidden. To perform a keyword search of your Safari tabs, tap the button in the lower-right corner to view all of your open tabs and then rotate your iPhone or iPad into landscape mode. You’ll see thumbnails of your open tabs and a search box in the upper-left corner. For reasons that escape me, the search box is not present when your iOS 10 device is in portrait mode.
Enlarge Image
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
When you search this way, Safari searches only the text in the title of each tab; the body of the Web page is not searched. While this arrangement means you need to remember the title of the page you want to access (or at least one of the words in it), it also means that search results are returned instantly.
For more, learn how to close all tabs at once in Safari and 22 other hidden features of iOS 10 and check out our complete guide to iOS 10.
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