UK spies violated privacy laws with bulk data collection
Ever since Edward Snowden’s leaks came to light, UK spy agencies have responded to accusations of surveillance overreach with a common boilerplate statement: that their activities are lawful, necessary and proportionate. However, they can’t always use that justification any more. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has ruled that key GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 bulk data collection programs violated privacy protections in the European Convention on Human Rights. Both a Bulk Communications Data effort (which covers data such as visited websites, email metadata and GPS locations) and a Bulk Personal Datasets initiative (covering biographical details like your communications and financial activities) didn’t have proper oversight until 2015, when some safeguards came into place. That’s particularly damning when BCD was had been in place since 1998, and BPD since 2006.
There weren’t sufficient codes of practice covering either program, the Tribunal says. Moreover, there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that there was “effective independent oversight.” Commissioners had an inherently limited ability to verify how spies collected, stored and destroyed data, and didn’t conduct detailed audits. Also, the public didn’t know or expect that these surveillance systems were in place — you can’t consent to a program when you don’t realize it exists.
The Tribunal is “satisfied” that the newer protections are following European Convention rights. However, the watchdog group Privacy International (which launched litigation to reveal these flaws) isn’t happy. It believes that authorization and oversight are still “deeply inadequate,” and that the government “barely touched” on its data collection practices even when given a chance. We’d add that the timing of the ruling is ironic, too. The Tribunal is accusing agencies of violating rights just as they’re about to get expanded powers under the Investigatory Powers Bill — while this includes explicit oversight, many are concerned that the UK’s privacy intrusions are only going to worsen.
Via: BBC
Source: IPT, Privacy International (Medium)
VR helped me grasp the life of a transgender wheelchair user
Playing The Circle is quite literally a transformative experience. Designed by Manos Agianniotakis, a student at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in Buckinghamshire, England, it’s a game that uses the Oculus Rift and Touch controllers to put you in the body of a wheelchair user suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In The Circle, you play as a Alex, a transgender woman who is attacked and ends up in a wheelchair. The game picks up Alex’s story around a month after the incident. She’s out of hospital, but traumatized and unable to leave her apartment. Isolated and withdrawn, her relationships with friends and family, many of whom are unaware of the transphobic nature of the attack, are strained. She begins reading her father’s diaries, and becomes obsessed a subject he was fascinated with toward the end of his life: Toynbee Tiles, mysterious plaques that are placed around North America.
Almost all of the game takes place in Alex’s apartment, viewed from a first-person perspective. You’ll spend much of your time at her desk, where you can interact with all the surrounding objects — chief among them a computer. You use this computer to investigate the aforementioned tiles, digging into the conspiracy theories that surround them. But it’s around the fringes of this “central” plot that the real meat of this game lies; where you’ll be able to dig into Alex’s condition, and rebuild relationships with Alex’s loved ones.
What you do with your time inside Alex’s body is up to you. Agianniotakis describes The Circle as “the smallest narrative sandbox.” The game runs the course of a year, during which the narrative unfolds organically. Alex is a fully shaped character, so you can’t exactly dictate what she does, but many interactions are optional. You can’t decide, for example, how exactly to respond to an email from Alex’s mother, but you can choose whether or not to respond to it — or even whether you want to read the email in the first place.
How you choose to spend your time in the game will dictate how well you understand Alex, and her troubles. You can pursue the Toynbee Tile mystery resolutely, ignoring the realities of PTSD and hiding from your family as best you can; you can reach out to your concerned loved ones and try to repair those broken bonds; or anything in between.
As interesting as the narrative sandbox is, it isn’t what made the game special for me. Instead, it’s the way Agianniotakis uses VR’s strengths and weaknesses to help you embody Alex, and understand her frustrations and feelings. One example in the demo I played at the EGX game show was a phone call Alex received.
Or rather, didn’t receive. You play the game seated, and at one point a phone begins to ring. Using 3D audio effects, it’s easy to locate the phone: on the floor, just to your right. Retrieving the handset is impossible, though. It’s carefully positioned to be just out of your grasp, no matter how hard you try to lean and reach, and the call goes to voicemail. Alex’s mother’s voice plays. She’s worried.
Another, more subtle tactic employs one of VR’s long-perceived weaknesses: inducing motion sickness. The game is punctuated by dream sequences, panic attacks and memories, in which Alex moves on a guided path through abstract vignettes related to her trauma. One such scene tackles her ongoing gender dysphoria. Shown from a third-person perspective, it sees Alex walk past silhouettes in a public bathroom — often a fraught place for a trans person to be.
During the sequence, I felt lightheaded, and a little uneasy. It wasn’t just from the challenging narrative, Agianniotakis explained: “I’m using the discomfort that virtual reality can cause with movement to force the player to almost feel a discomfort with their own body,” he said. The scene isn’t noticeably jerky, it’s just… different. And the choice is deliberate. “It doesn’t make you sick, but I want people to have a slight physical side effect when they play through it, without making it extremely uncomfortable of course, to create the notion that you’re almost not part of your own body,” he added.
I’ve felt sick during VR sessions before — especially in the early days of bootstrapped development kits — and this wasn’t that. At no point did I feel compelled to take off the headset, nor did I actually worry about vomiting. Whether it was playing at a different framerate, or something to do with movement speed, it led to a gentle feeling of disquiet that made for a more poignant experience.
Agianniotakis is clearly working hard to build The Circle as a carefully considered, almost educational experience. But he has no first-hand knowledge of being either transgender or a wheelchair user. Instead, he, writer Jess O’Kane and producer Ser En Low have relied on extensive research, both passively through reading studies and other material, and actively by getting feedback from trans people and people living with disability.
“The trans people I’ve been able to speak to are not gamers, and have difficulty giving feedback about it as a game,” Agianniotakis explained, “but they were able to speak to the representation as a whole and explain some of the feelings that come with gender dysphoria.”
Through one of the game’s public showings, he met a small group of trans people from Manchester, England, who are ardent gamers. He hopes to convene with them again to further develop and hone the experience. The response from wheelchair users has also been positive, Agianniotakis said, but one of the strongest reactions actually came from the adolescent sibling of a wheelchair user, who found it enlightening to experience life, however briefly, from something closer to his brother’s perspective.
I usually get inspiration for my projects from real-life, and mental health is an everyday, often misrepresented, reality for way too many people to be ignored.
Manos Agianniotakis
Exploring mental health is not a new topic for Agianniotakis. He previously produced the interactive story An Interview, a reimagining of the play Fake It ‘Til You Make It, which focuses on male clinical depression. “My father suffered from depression and anxiety throughout his life,” he explained. “Investigating certain conditions helped me understand better the world he lived in … Mental health is an everyday, often misrepresented, reality for way too many people to be ignored.” Currently taking priority over game development is Agianniotakis’ MA dissertation at NFTS on the depiction of mental health in video games.
The 15-minute slice of The Circle I played was powerful, and left me wanting more. I felt hints of transference (in this context, the feeling that you are someone else). I’ve experienced transference before through VR, but that was through a psychological experiment that essentially tricked multiple senses in a way that you just can’t do with a regular Oculus Rift or HTC Vive setup. I can see myself, in a quiet room at home, enthralled for the hour or so it’ll take to play through one of its many paths.
That’s why The Circle excites me. Its primary goal is to make you lose yourself; to help you understand what it feels like to be wheelchair bound, to be traumatized or to suffer with gender dysphoria. And even in a busy, noisy demo area, full of shouting gamers and announcements, even with just 15 minutes, I started to understand, and to empathize. There can be no stronger praise.
Agianniotakis hopes The Circle will be ready by fall 2017, but will be demoing the game at various game shows in the meantime. The next public event scheduled is Develop:VR on November 24th in London.
‘Limit Ad Tracking’ Popular in U.S. After iOS 10, Global Awareness ‘Stagnant’
Approximately 18 million iOS users in the United States have turned on Apple’s “Limit Ad Tracking” feature in settings, effectively preventing advertisements within apps from being targeted directly at them and their browsing habits. Based on a recent report from Adjust (via Advertising Age), that’s now 20 percent of total iOS users in the United States who have LAT turned on.
Although it’s been available for users since iOS 6 in 2012, a tweak to the feature in iOS 10 lets users completely avoid what’s referred to as an “Identifier for Advertising,” which pinpoints devices with a unique ID number to serve up targeted advertisements. With LAT turned on, users now become ghosts to IDFA requests from ad networks, making tracking the behavior of an iOS user “significantly more complicated.”
Despite Apple’s bolstering of the feature in iOS 10, Adjust’s report noted that “on a global level, there’s no evidence of an upward trend” of users becoming aware of LAT, which is somewhat hidden in the Privacy sub-menu of Settings.
“If people were more interested in reducing the number of retargeted ads, and if they were aware of the effects of the Limit Ad Tracking settings, we would expect a steadily rising trend throughout the last month as adoption of iOS 10 rises and people become aware of the changes. So far, on a global level, there’s no evidence of an upward trend – the global rates are stagnant, at around 18%.
In spite of global stagnation, Adjust mentioned that in certain places — particularly the United States — LAT is beginning to become more well-known among consumers. Specifically, following the launch of iOS 10 in September, 2 million people activated LAT for the first time in the U.S.
Among other countries, Germany follows the U.S. in total iOS users with LAT activated (19.3 percent), followed by territories including the United Kingdom (16.5 percent), and Canada (14.4 percent). Places like the Netherlands, with 22 percent, beat out the United States. Countries where privacy concerns are raised see a higher percentage of users opting out of targeted advertising, but as Adjust said, “it’s not evenly distributed across countries, and it’s additionally not evenly distributed among target audiences.”
With the growth of public knowledge surrounding such ad-blocking features, co-founder of Adjust Paul Muller noted that, “this is trending in a direction where it’s not just the tech-savvy, ad-allergic crowd any more. Marketers will face a large, distributed and worst of all ‘unknown’ segment of users, especially in places like Germany and the U.S.”
Related Roundup: iOS 10
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Apple Stores Removing Lead Creative Role After Introducing New ‘Creative Pro’ Position
Apple has informed retail employees it will be removing the Lead Creative role at its stores, according to multiple sources. The changes should take effect by mid November at all stores except select flagship locations.
Apple will be relegating current Lead Creatives to the role of Creative as part of the transition. A source said pay will remain the same for existing leads, but their current leadership responsibilities will be slowly removed.
The move comes less than three months after Apple introduced a new “Creative Pro” position above Creative. Retail employees holding this position are considered the most knowledgable about Apple products and services, providing customers with advice and expertise about products such as the iPhone. Creative Pros are situated on the sales floor, internally described as the Product Zone.
Tag: Apple retail
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HP’s Elite X3 gets closer to the dream of a Windows Phone as a PC
Everything about HP’s Elite X3 seems like a gamble. It’s the company’s first phone in two years, and it’s the first major Windows Phone device since Microsoft’s Lumia 950 debuted last year. HP is betting big that premium hardware and the ability to use the phone as both a pseudo-desktop and laptop will actually be a boon for enterprise customers. Naturally, too, HP is hoping to tempt businesses away from BlackBerry. But while it’s nice to see the company swing for the fences (like with its gorgeous Spectre 13 ultraportable), it’s not enough in this case to make the $699 Elite X3 a useful device.
Let’s make this clear up front: The Elite X3 isn’t a phone meant for consumers. It’s the sort of thing HP wants businesses to buy in bulk. The company is pushing it as three devices in one: an enterprise-grade smartphone, a desktop replacement (with the $799 Desk Dock bundle) and an ultraportable laptop (with the $1,299 Lap Dock bundle, which also includes the Deck Dock). Those two accessories are powered by Microsoft’s Continuum feature, which transforms the mobile OS into something closer to desktop Windows.
On paper, it all sounds like an IT manager’s dream, since they’ll only have to manage a single device for every employee. But speaking as a former IT worker, it’s clear that HP still has a long way to go before a phone can truly replace dedicated laptops and desktops.
At the very least, the Elite X3 is a sign that HP can build a decent-looking phone. It’s a large device, with a 5.96-inch WQHD (2,560 by 1,400) AMOLED display. But it actually feels good to hold, with curved rear edges wrapped in smooth plastic. Aside from the gaudy chrome strip along the bottom of its case (which houses stereo Bang & Olufsen speakers), the Elite X3 seems like a natural evolution of HP’s designs from the Pre 3 era. Along the back, there’s a fingerprint sensor below the 16-megapixel camera. Up front, an 8MP shooter sits beside an iris camera that serves as a second biometric authentication method.
HP didn’t skimp when it came to internal hardware either. The Elite X3 is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chip, just like most of this year’s flagship phones. The device also packs in 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, which is expandable with microSD cards as large as 2TB. The phone is also available in single- and dual-SIM models, making it especially useful for international travel. At 192 grams (0.42 pounds), the X3 definitely makes its presence known in your pocket. But at least the weight distribution is such that it doesn’t feel heavy while you’re holding it.
As a mobile device, the Elite X3 is, well… a Windows phone. The platform feels pretty much unchanged from last year, even with the few tweaks from August’s Anniversary Update. That’s not a huge surprise: Microsoft’s Lumia 950 and 950 XL were failures, and the company has been silent about its mobile plans this year. The Windows app store is slowly getting better, but Windows 10 Mobile still has all the same limitations it did last year. The X3’s camera is also surprisingly slow. It stutters before autofocusing (HP says a software fix is coming), and there’s a noticeable delay when you’re shooting photos.
So, you might ask, why even build a Windows phone today? It turns out HP has a secret trick up its sleeve called Workspace. It’s a virtualized environment that lets you run full Windows apps when using the X3 in Continuum mode with its docks. That’s useful, because Microsoft’s much-touted Continuum feature is still as limited as ever, in that it only works with Universal Windows apps, and there still aren’t nearly enough of those around.
You’ll have to pay dearly for the privilege of using Workspace, though. Pricing starts at $49 a month per user, and you’ll be limited to 4GB of RAM, 10 apps at most and 40 hours of usage. Bumping up to the “Premium” tier, which starts at $79 a month per user, gets you 8GB of RAM, unlimited apps and 80 hours of usage. While HP is pushing the X3 as a truly no-compromise, do-everything device, I can’t imagine many people (or their IT departments) will be keen on having their software usage clocked.
I was only able to test the Elite X3 with its Desk Dock, not the sleek Lap Dock (that’s coming later this week, on October 21st). The beefy Desk Dock includes two USB 3.0 ports, one USB-C connection, a full-sized Displayport slot and, surprisingly enough, an Ethernet jack. It has a metallic chrome finish, as well as a rubbery material along its base to keep it in place on your desk. One strange thing: Though this is a device that’s solely meant to connect to an external monitor, HP didn’t include any DisplayPort cables or adapters in the box.
With all the necessary cables connected, I simply placed the X3 on the Desk Dock for it to wake up my monitor and display a Windows login screen. At first, I was astounded at how closely the interface resembled full-fledged Windows, but it wasn’t long before I noticed the limitations. The “Start” menu simply shows you the list of Universal Windows apps you have installed. You also can’t resize and tile apps as you would on the desktop; it’s just a slightly nicer way to use one mobile app at a time.
After a few minutes of testing, the Desk Dock stopped recognizing my Microsoft Sculpt wireless keyboard, even though the accompanying mouse continued to work fine. Eventually, I just plugged in an old Logitech keyboard I had lying around (which severely hampered my typing speed). You’d think even Microsoft’s own hardware would work properly in Continuum mode.
While testing Microsoft-built apps like Edge and Outlook, I also noticed some slowdown, which was surprising given the X3’s Snapdragon 820 CPU. Opening and closing tabs in Edge often took several seconds, and that’s not counting the surprisingly long time pages actually took to load. On its own, it’s clear that Continuum is far from what Microsoft originally promised, so it’s no wonder HP decided to add its own productivity solution on top of it.
HP’s Workspace environment is pretty barebones at this point. Once you sign in, you can launch apps like Notepad (yay?), Google Chrome, the Office 2013 suite, Slack and Acrobat Reader. There’s even Internet Explorer 11 support, which could be useful for companies stuck with legacy web apps (this is how you really know HP wants those enterprise dollars).
If you’ve used any virtualized app before, you’ll notice the same sort of slowdown when using Workspace. It’s fast enough to actually get work done, but there’s a noticeable delay when doing something as simple as typing. I was able to edit Word and Powerpoint documents with ease, and hop into Slack conversations with my colleagues, but I never got used to the slow typing speeds. That may not sound like a huge issue, but it could easily hinder the workflow of fast touch-typists. And take note: These are the speeds I saw when only a few reviewers and HP employees were using Workspace. It could easily get worse once more people hop on.
For all of its faults, Workspace is a decent solution to the endemic compatibility issues with Windows 10’s Continuum feature. It did feel a bit weird to see a countdown timer ticking off how much longer I could actually use the virtualized environment, though. Instead of freeing me from the shackles of juggling many devices, it felt more like being a hopeless corporate drone in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
I’ll admit, my testing of the Elite X3 doesn’t cover the multitude of ways businesses could actually integrate it. But speaking as someone with experience choosing, deploying and supporting a wide variety of IT equipment, this device seems to introduce more problems than it solves. An aging desktop computer would be far more useful to most office workers than the X3’s Desk Dock. And while the Lap Dock sounds good in theory, it’ll likely suffer from similar performance issues (I’ll be testing that soon). With ultraportables getting cheaper every year, it’ll be even harder for IT departments to swallow the $500 cost for a compromised accessory.
The Elite X3 is basically pure potential. It’s the best stab I’ve seen yet at making Microsoft’s Continuum feature genuinely useful. And it could be a compelling mobile option as businesses look beyond BlackBerry. But right now, it’s hampered by Microsoft’s disinterest in mobile and the inherent limitations of virtualized software.
SoundHound’s voice assistant lives inside its own speaker
Alexa and Google Home aren’t the only pieces of voice-controlled assistant hardware available this holiday season. Today SoundHound announced the first third-party speaker to harness the power of its Hound platform. Built by Boombotix, the stand-alone device will not only play your music, but can answer your questions about the weather, flights, news, sports scores and more.
The Hurricane smart speaker is built upon SoundHound’s Houndify speech-to-meaning technology. Like Alexa, it has a wake phrase (OK Hound) and will answer your queries. But the tech’s impressive ability to answer a context-aware series of questions is now no longer regulated to the Hound app. For example, you can ask the device the weather in a city, then ask how much a hotel will cost, where you can get pizza and the weather in the same city without mentioning its name in follow-up questions.
Also unlike Alexa, new features don’t have to be turned on. “On our platform, you never have to enable a format or skill set, it will just work,” Katie McMahon, VP and GM at SoundHound told Engadget. The company calls these “Domains” and currently has over 150 available for users.
And while asking questions in a more natural way is nice, the real focus of the Hurricane is playing music. The portable speaker connects via WiFi. But if you want to go outside beyond your home network it will also pair via Bluetooth to a smartphone to keep its connection to SoundHound and your music service of choice.
Boombotix CEO Sean Sullivan said, “It’s great to have those side skills, but for us, really the focus was on making a really great music experience first.”
To that end, the Hurricane has two full-range drivers and a 10-watt active four-inch subwoofer. To listen to your questions, it has four microphones and an LED that lights up to notify you that it’s listening and thinking.
The Hound-powered speaker is currently available on Kickstarter for $199 and will ship in late December.
Source: SoundHound
Bloomberg: Apple isn’t building a car anymore
Remember Apple’s ambitious, long-rumored and totally not top-secret plan to build a self-driving car for the masses? According to Bloomberg, it’s dead, with several hundred employees being reassigned to other parts of the company’s business. The project, codenamed Titan, has been scaled back from a full-blown vehicle to simply a self-driving system that can be sold to car makers for use in their own vehicles. It gets worse, since Titan’s leaders have been told that their team needs to produce something feasible before the end of 2017, or else.
We’ve been hearing nothing but rumors about Apple’s intentions in the self-driving car space for the last few years. But apparently there’s been behind-the-scenes chaos since 2015, when managers began to argue about what the Apple car would take. The report quotes an unnamed source saying that Titan was “an incredible failure of leadership” until Apple stalwart Bob Mansfield came over to lead the team. It was Mansfield who re-shaped the project, killing the idea of building a Tesla competitor and concentrate on a technology platform that could be sold to third parties.
The piece also mentions how Apple’s well-seasoned executives seemed to struggle with the problematic nature of automotive supply chain. The firm is famous for throwing its weight (and cash) around to secure large quantities of components for its computers and smartphones. But apparently this track record didn’t carry over to manufacturers who make car parts, who weren’t prepared to make the necessary investment. Coupled with talented employees going elsewhere and Apple’s poor record of partnering with third parties and it looks like we can kiss our dreams of a drivable iPhone goodbye.
Source: Bloomberg
Carbon Xprize chooses the 28 best solutions for CO2 emissions
Twenty-eight teams made it through the $20 million NRG COSIA Carbon Xprize’s first round. Now, they have to start proving that they can truly transform a meaningful amount of carbon dioxide emissions into useful products. The semi-finalists from various universities, startups, big companies and non-profits all over the globe will do a test run of their technology over a ten-month period. Judges will look at how much CO2 they can convert, as well as the value of their products.
The ten teams that make it to round three will split $2.5 million to be able to participate in the finals, wherein they’ll have to do large-scale testing under real world conditions. They’ll even be stationed right next to actual power plants.
As you can see below, the semi-finalists are divided into two tracks: one group will work on coal, while the other will work on natural gas, though there are quite a few overlaps. It looks like most of the teams want to make concrete and different types of fuel from the carbon emissions they collect. Some of them have pretty interesting products in mind, though, including pet food and even toothpaste.
Competition Track A (coal) includes 13 teams creating technologies for use at a coal power plant:
- Aljadix (Switzerland) – Led by Thomas Digby, the team is producing carbon negative biofuel.
- Breathe (India) – Led by Sebastian Peter, the team is producing methanol.
- C4X (China) – Led by Wayne Song, the team is producing methanol and bio-composite boards.
- Carbon Capture Machine (Scotland) – Led by Mohammed Imbabi, the team is producing solid carbonates.
- Carbon Cure (Canada) – Led by Jennifer Wagner, the team is producing enhanced concrete.
- Carbon Upcycling Technologies (Canada) – Led by Apoorv Sinha, the team is producing graphitic nanoparticles.
- Carbon Upcycling UCLA (United States) – Led by J.R. DeShazo, the team is producing 3D-printed concrete replacement building material.
- EE-AGG (United States) – Led by Mark Edelman, the team is producing methanol.
- Innovator Energy (United States) – Led by Ethan Novek, the team is producing syngas and acetic acid.
- Low-Energy-Consumption CO2 Capture and Conversion (United States)– Led by Maohong Fan, the team is producing fuels and chemicals.
- Opus 12 (United States) – Led by Etosha Cave, the team is producing plastics, fertilizers, and gasoline.
- Terra COH (United States) – Led by Led by Jimmy Randolph, the team is producing energy storage and retrieval, and electricity generation.
- Vorsana (United States) – Led by David McCutchen, the team is using shear electrolysis to produce syngas.
Competition Track B (natural gas) includes 21 teams creating technologies for use at a natural gas power plant:
- AirCarbon (United States) – Led by Mark Herrema, the team is producing polymers.
- C2CNF (United States) – Led by Stuart Licht, the team is producing carbon nanotubes.
- Carbicrete (Canada) – Led by Yuri Mytko, the team is producing carbon-negative construction blocks.
- Carbon Cure (Canada) – Led by Jennifer Wagner, the team is producing enhanced concrete.
- Carbon Upcycling Technologies (Canada) – Led by Apoorv Sinha, the team is producing graphene nanoplatelets.
- Carbon Upcycling UCLA (United States) – Led by J.R. DeShazo, 3D-printed concrete replacement building material.
- CAT.ALY.ST (United States) – Led by Stafford Sheehan, the team is producing biofuels.
- CERT (Canada) – Led by Ted Sargent, the team is producing formic acid.
- CO2 Solutions (Canada) – Led by Jonathan Carley, the team is producing high protein animal feed.
- Dimensional Energy (United States) – Led by Jason Salfi, the team is producing hydrocarbon fuels.
- EE-AGG (United States) – Led by Mark Edelman, the team is producing methanol.
- Hago Energetics (United States) – Led by Wilson Hago, the team is producing gas and liquid fuels.
- Ingenuity Lab (Canada) – Led by Carlo Montemagno, the team is producing dihydroxyacetone (DHA) and other chemicals.
- Innovator Energy (United States) – Led by Ethan Novek, the team is producing syngas and acetic acid.
- Low-Energy-Consumption CO2 Capture and Conversion (United States) – Led by Maohong Fan, the team is producing fuels and chemicals.
- Pond Technology’s Carbon Cyclers (Canada) – Led by Peter Howard, the team is producing biodiesel and solid biofuel.
- Protein Power (United States) – Led by Lisa Dyson, the team is producing high-protein fish food.
- RES Kaidi (United States) – Led by Mark Robertson, the team is producing dimethyl ether (DME) for chemical feedstock or fuel.
- Tandem Technical (Canada) – Led by Jerry Flynn, the team is producing health supplements, toothpaste, paint and fertilizers.
- Terra CO2 Technologies (Canada) – Led by Dylan Jones, the team is producing metal carbonate compounds and sulphur byproducts.
- White Dog Labs (United States) – Led by Bryan Tracy, the team is producing acetone.
Source: Cosia Carbon Xprize
Lenovo’s futuristic Yoga Book is a novelty item not worth buying yet
At a time when Apple, Microsoft and Google are pairing their new tablets with keyboards, Lenovo has done the unthinkable. It’s completely ditched a true keyboard for a digital sketchpad, trading snappiness, travel and actuation for a smooth, futuristic touch surface. The idea is to offer a note-taking experience that’s so effective, you’d feel comfortable leaving the keyboard behind. The Lenovo Yoga Book, available in Android ($500) and Windows ($550) versions, is inventive. But Lenovo claims that the Yoga Book is the “ultimate tablet for productivity and creativity,” and that’s where the company is wrong. Despite plenty of well-intended enhancements, such as multi-window support in the Android model, Lenovo still failed to make device that truly facilitates productivity.
Hardware
The Yoga Book is available with either Android or Windows, and the only differences on the hardware front are their color options (the Windows version is only available in black) and the detailing around the trackpad. Either way, both flavors are gorgeous in an understated, elegant sort of way. The design combines a subtle matte finish and clean lines, with a touch of sparkle along the hinge. The best part is how thin and light the magnesium alloy frame is, at 0.38 inches thick and 1.5 pounds. Though it should be easy to take to meetings, as a tablet the Yoga Book feels heavy.
You’ll need two hands to pry open the device, since it’s magnetically sealed and meanwhile there isn’t an indentation in the edge where you can stick your finger as you’re lifting the lid. Once you get it open, the first thing you’ll notice is how smooth and flat the keyboard area is. That emptiness can be a little startling at first, but you’ll get used to it soon enough. Whether you’ll get used to the way it feels, though, is another matter entirely.
Like Lenovo’s previous Yoga convertibles, the Book has a sturdy 360-degree hinge that lets you set it up in four different “modes.” Flip the screen all the way around to use it as a tablet, prop it up with the screen facing you for a makeshift TV, or spread the two sides completely flat if you want a surface to draw on. You can also use the Yoga Book as a traditional clamshell laptop, but because there isn’t a keyboard to anchor it, the device sometimes topples over if you jab at the screen too hard.
Speaking of, the Yoga Book’s 10.1-inch full HD IPS display is plenty bright, and was easy to see even in direct sunlight. However, its glossy finish means if you’re watching something with dark sets, such as The Dark Knight or Stranger Things, you’ll see quite a bit of glare.
The Book comes with what Lenovo calls a “Real Pen,” which is thicker and more comfortable to hold onto than Samsung’s S Pen or the Apple Pencil. It even comes with a cap that doubles as a tool for changing out the stylus filament. I just wish Lenovo had been able to squeeze in an onboard dock for the stylus, but the Yoga Book is barely thick enough to house a pen on board.
Keyboard and trackpad
But let’s get to the feature that sets the Yoga Book apart: the disappearing touch keyboard. Lenovo calls it the Halo Keyboard, presumably after the rings of light that surround each key region. Instead of physical buttons that you can push down on, you’ll see outlines of them on the smooth, touch-sensitive surface. These virtual buttons are large and evenly spaced, and you don’t have to hit them hard to make your keystrokes register. Managing to type quickly and accurately, though, is quite difficult.
It’s a lot to get used to. Lenovo, for its part, claims that two hours is enough to become familiar with the setup here. Those who type with just two fingers will probably have an easier time surmounting the learning curve, but touch typists like myself might never get acclimated. For us, resting your fingers on the F and J keys during a typing pause is second nature, but in this case, that would trigger those letters on the Halo deck. That means if you’re going to use the Yoga Book, you’d better be prepared to unlearn old habits.
Still, Lenovo at least tried to make the experience efficient. It added adjustable haptic feedback and backlighting to help the Halo setup mimic a real keyboard, as well as predictive text and autocorrect for accuracy. While the Windows version relies on Microsoft’s onscreen keyboard, the Android flavor uses third-party TouchPal software, whose autocomplete suggestions I found intrusive. Any momentum I had built up was frequently interrupted when I had to hit the return key twice to break to a new line, since the first key press only served to confirm that I wanted to use the first suggested word. I was, however, pleased to find that common shortcuts such as Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Del and Ctrl-F were supported. My typing eventually got pretty accurate, but never very fast.
The onscreen keyboard provided little relief. Not in the Android version, at least. Its large buttons showed both letters and special characters, like ampersands and percent symbols. Seeing those special characters didn’t make them easier to access, and their presence only really served to clutter up the interface. It was distracting and a little confusing. You can switch back to Google’s default option, but even so: I wish Lenovo had handled this better. Fortunately, at least, this wasn’t an issue on the Windows version.
Another thing that bugged me about the Halo keyboard was the trackpad below it, which is small, sluggish and jumpy. Taps sometimes registered clicks, but other times nothing happened. This occurred across both OSes, but it was more pronounced on the Windows device. Other than using the touch display, there really isn’t a great way to interact with the Yoga Book.
Sketchpad experience
Still, doing away with a real keyboard is sometimes worth it, if only because of the cool sketchpad integration. The Halo panel turns into what Lenovo calls the Create Pad when you press the pen button on the top right of the deck. You can use the included stylus to draw on this; it’s like having a Wacom digitizer attached to its own screen.
What’s more impressive is that you can write on the Pad even when the tablet is asleep. Press and hold the pen button until it vibrates and you can write on the plain black sketchpad. Your scribbles will be saved to Lenovo’s note-taking app. That’s interesting, but not all that useful since you can’t see what you’re writing.
Separately, there’s a feature that lets you write with real pen and paper and have that all simultaneously show up on the Yoga Book. This is perhaps the feature that traditionalists will love most. Using the pen’s included cap, you can swap out the stylus for an ink cartridge and use it as an actual pen. Place any notepad on the keyboard and start writing, and it’ll show up on the screen. This, too, works while the tablet is asleep.
All of these features work as promised. And yet, as close as that last one gets to matching a real pen-and-paper experience, I still felt limited by the physical boundaries of the writing surface. In a note-taking session where I needed to be fast, I found it easier to just write on paper, which stayed put, and on which I could write horizontally, vertically and in corners. On the Yoga Book, I had to pause and make sure the pen was hovering at the right spot before I could continue scribbling. Most of the notes I took ended up not making much sense.
Ultimately, the sketchpad is useful for drawing and writing short phrases; not so much for extended note-taking sessions.
Software
Other than the note-taking and drawing implementations, both editions of the Yoga Book run pretty standard versions of their respective operating systems. Windows 10 in particular is a better option for those who want multi-tasking tools and support for desktop apps. Despite Lenovo’s efforts to integrate multi-window apps in the Android Marshmallow version, the feature only works for select programs, such as Gmail, YouTube and File Manager. Not many third-party apps can do this at launch, and you can only open up to three apps side by side anyway. When Lenovo updates the device with Android Nougat (it’s unclear when that will be), multi-window will be a native feature that works with all apps.
One feature I really like is the camera’s Smart Capture mode, which lets you shoot pictures of important info, such as lecture slides, and converts it into a flat, PDF-like image. I tried this out at a recent product briefing, taking shots of presentation pages from an odd angle. The app quickly and accurately detected the sides of the projected screen, highlighted them in green, straightened the image and then zoomed in on the highlighted area.
Initially I wasn’t wild about the camera placement. It’s on the Halo keyboard deck, next to the pen button, which means it faces up when you’re using the Yoga Book as a laptop. But use it as a tablet and it’s well-placed as a rear camera. As you’d expect, the front camera sits above the display, ready for selfies.
Performance and battery life
| Lenovo Yoga Book (Windows 10) | 2,104 | P485 | 149 MB/s (reads); 42.9 MB/s (writes) |
| Microsoft Surface 3 | 2,839 | P552 | 163 MB/s (reads); 39.2 MB/s (writes) |
Thanks to its 1.4GHz quad-core Intel Atom x5-z8550 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (expandable via the microSD card slot), the Yoga Book was generally zippy and multitasked well. Switching between Note Saver, Camera and Google Docs was easy, and I could quickly snap pictures of presentation slides, even while Drive, Play Store, Gallery and those other apps I mentioned were open. I didn’t encounter any delay when swiping through pages of apps, and zooming in on web pages felt smooth. There was some lag in launching apps such as Camera and Amazon’s Kindle, though.
| Lenovo Yoga Book (Android 6.0) | 3,857 | 770.8 | 47.5 | 3,959 | 26,663 | 49,658 |
| Google Pixel C | 6,294 | 670 | N/A | N/A | 40,980 | 34,948 |
* SunSpider: Lower scores are better.
Benchmarks tell largely the same story. The Android Yoga Book trailed the Pixel C and the iPad Pro in Sunspider, while its Vellamo score was half that of the Pixel. Its performance on graphics tests 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited and GFX Bench were similarly lackluster. The Windows version kept pace in PCMark 7 with last year’s Surface 3, which uses an older quad-core Atom CPU.
Battery life
Lenovo Yoga Book (Android)
11:09
Lenovo Yoga Book (Windows)
8:06
Microsoft Surface 3
9:11
Google Pixel C
8:15
With its large 8,500mAh battery, the Yoga Book took two days of light to moderate use to get down to a 10 percent charge. That’s in line with Lenovo’s maximum battery life claim of 15 hours. The Android version lasted 11 hours and nine minutes on Engadget’s standard battery test, which involves looping an HD video at 50 percent brightness. We tested the Windows version at 65 percent brightness, and it clocked 8 hours and 6 minutes. The Pixel C and the Surface 3 both fell a few hours short of the Android’s runtime. You’ll want to make sure to use the included adapter when recharging, because that big battery will take a while to re-juice. Lenovo said the device will get fully charged in about three hours with the supplied cable.
The competition
There really isn’t anything quite like the Yoga Book. Even though the Surface Pro 4 also takes in pen input and is often marketed with a keyboard that you have to buy separately, it also uses a laptop-grade processor that’s much more robust than the one inside the Yoga Book.
The Android model faces off against Google’s Pixel C, which also starts at $499. While the Pixel is much more powerful than the Yoga, it, too, suffers from some input issues — in particular, the occasional sticky key. The Pixel doesn’t come with a stylus either, so those who are looking to doodle might prefer the Yoga Book.
There are other devices that convert your real-world scribblings to digital, such as Wacom’s Bamboo Spark ($200) and the Moleskine Smart Writing Set ($200). These require internet connectivity to save your notes to the cloud, and, unlike the Yoga Book, are built for one specific purpose. Artists could also opt for a Wacom Intuous digitizer (starting from $99) that attaches to their computers to make digital drawing easier, but this isn’t as portable a solution.
In the end, the Yoga Book exists in a category of its own, so none of these comparisons will be perfect.
Wrap-up
At first blush, the Yoga Book is a compelling device. The sketchpad integration feels smart and intuitive. But, as a fervent note-taker, I just couldn’t see myself taking it to important meetings. I simply couldn’t depend on it when I needed to quickly take copious notes — whether it be by hand or by keyboard. This specific complaint wouldn’t be as significant if not for the way Lenovo is positioning the device. It’s a “tablet for ultimate productivity and creativity,” according to the company’s website and marketing materials.
But real productivity lies in being able to very specifically and quickly control what you are entering into a device. And you can’t quite do that with the Yoga Book. Its middling performance and display don’t help either. Still, it’s an intriguing first step, and artists or doodlers might be interested. The Yoga Book is innovative, but innovative isn’t always reason enough to buy. Maybe Lenovo will fare better with a future version, if it decides to make one, but it will have to come up with a much better keyboard and improve the tablet’s performance for it to be worth considering. Until then, the Yoga Book is little more than a novelty item.
Apple and Huawei Will Benefit Most From Note 7’s Failure, but Profit May Have Already ‘Peaked Out’
Apple and Huawei will be the biggest beneficiaries following the discontinuation of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 line, according to research conducted by KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The two companies will mainly see orders increased by users looking for a smartphone with dual camera support, including Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus and Huawei’s upcoming Mate 9.
While Kuo believes Apple will benefit majorly following Samsung’s troubled Note 7, the analyst also says that those benefits are “largely reflected in raised forecasts,” and not as much in actual iPhone shipping numbers. Of the original 12-14 million Note 7 units expected to ship in 2016 before the exploding battery drama, Kuo estimates 5-7 million Note 7 users may switch to iPhone, mainly expected to be the iPhone 7 Plus.
Consumers that have switched from Note 7 to iPhone after the recall and halted production can be identified as having the following characteristics: (1) no trust in the Samsung brand anymore; (2) could be former iOS users; (3) like dual camera feature; and (4) like the subsidy packages of telecom operators (iPhone 7 and 7 Plus were the most promoted flagship models in September).
Because of this, the analyst believes Apple’s biggest benefits of the Note 7 discontinuation have already “peaked out.” It’s estimated that it will take Apple between 3 and 5 weeks to accommodate additional orders of the iPhone 7, especially “if the company does not expand the current production capacity of the iPhone 7 Plus.”
Right behind Apple, Kuo believes that Huawei will gain the second biggest benefit of the Note 7’s failure, particularly due to its foothold in China and Europe. With the impending launch of the Mate 9 in the fall, the analyst looks at Huawei as the best alternative for Note 7 users who are leaving Samsung’s smartphone lineup but seeking to remain in the Android family.
Ultimately, Kuo notes that while the impact of the discontinuation of the Note 7 will likely not last very long, if Samsung makes the same mistakes on the Galaxy S8 — expected to enter mass production in Q1 2017 — the analyst believes its brand “will be hurt immensely.” It’s expected Samsung will be more patient with the S8, however, since the smartphone’s 10 nanometer production process is facing yield issues and as a whole the company will “make greater efforts with quality control” after rushing to production with the Note 7.
The Note 7’s discontinuation began with a recall of the devices in early September following a few user reports of exploding batteries in the smartphone. After the recall, Samsung faced a series of unfortunate events as its shares plummeted, supposedly safe replacement phones began exploding, and a Bloomberg report painted it in an unfavorable light, indicating that the company rushed the Note 7 into production to do battle with Apple’s iPhone 7.
Prior to launch, rumors that eventually became true were suggesting that the iPhone 7 would not receive a major design change, so Samsung could therefore benefit from being an enticing alternative to users on the fence. The Note 7 is now officially discontinued, banned from all United States passenger flights, and expected to cost Samsung around $2.3 billion, essentially erasing “all the mobile business profit” from the company’s revenue for the quarter.
Related Roundup: iPhone 7
Tags: KGI Securities, Ming-Chi Kuo
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