San Francisco judge denies Airbnb’s lawsuit against the city
When Airbnb sued San Francisco in June, claiming that people listing their apartments for rent were responsible for any wrongdoing (like failing to register as a business), city officials were quick to respond. At the time, they said that the rental outfit was reading the Communications Decency Act (CDA) how it wanted to. As such, a city judge has rejected the suit, according to Reuters. Presiding judge James Donato said that the CDA does not “regulate what can or cannot be said or posted in the listings.”
But what does free speech online have to do with any of this? Airbnb claims that it shouldn’t be on the hook for what users put in their listings, and that it isn’t breaking laws, its users who failed to go through a lengthy registration process for renting out their living spaces are.
“Further, Airbnb’s argument that the city violated the First Amendment is moot because the ordinance ‘was not motivated by a desire to suppress speech,’” Reuters reports. As a bit of silver lining, Judge Donato did concede that the current legal process for registration needs some work. How this will affect other lawsuits in other cities remains to be seen. Who knows, maybe Transylvani’a’s laws are a little more lax. We’ve reached out to Airbnb for more information and will update this post should it arrive.
Source: Reuters
PS4’s Sharefactory app now lets you make GIFs from your videos
PS4’s Sharefactory app, which lets players stitch together video, music and photos into sweet highlight reels, has steadily built out its toolbox since Sony released it back in April 2014. Some have added options for slow-mo and timelapse, while the most recent introduced picture-in-picture to include simultaneous video play. But those have toyed with yesterday’s formats. For all the cool kids, Sony’s finally bringing GIF-making support to the app, letting users create animated clips up to 10 seconds long with all the captions their little hearts desire.
My kingdom for a grapple kit #PS4share pic.twitter.com/LEsX9WGJX6
— David Lumb (@OutOnALumb) November 9, 2016
It’s all part of a Sharefactory 2.0 release package. If you’ve hooked the app up to Twitter, you can tweet out your GIFs right from your console. Sony has also added a collage mode so users can arrange up to six photos in whatever arrangement they crave for their own “Wish You Were Here” gaming postcard.
While there are a few performance and UI tweaks, the last big news for the app’s new version is support for PS4 Pro. Users can now edit and export their 1080p videos and 4K screenshots. So even if your friends haven’t all upgraded their screens to take in your content’s high-definition glory, you can rest assured that all your headshot montages and GTA Online rampages are as crisp as possible.
Source: PlayStation blog
Edward Snowden will discuss Trump and privacy on November 10th
American technology policies could change significantly under Donald Trump, and that includes its stance on privacy. How will the new leader alter government surveillance, for example? Edward Snowden might have an answer. The whistleblower and Dutch search engine StartPage are hosting a live event on November 10th at 4:30PM Eastern to address what happens to privacy in the Trump era, among other questions. Snowden speaking engagements are nothing new, but this is special — he’s more than a little familiar with government spying activities, and this is his first chance to opine on how things might be different under a new administration.
Snowden hasn’t said much of anything about the subject as of this writing. However, Trump doesn’t exactly have a stellar record on internet privacy so far. He has proposed reauthorizing the Patriot Act and the previous, less restrained NSA mass surveillance that took place while the Act was in force. He tends to “err on the side of security” over privacy, even if he’s not especially fond of it. As such, Snowden probably won’t have many kind things to say. He’s in favor of more privacy wherever possible, and that could easily put him at greater odds with the US government than he is now.
Source: StartPage
Google Home first impressions: It’ll get better
Google has been on a mission to make its way into the living room for years. The Nexus Q, Google’s futuristic digital media player from 2012, was perhaps the company’s first big push into the connected home space, though the device never actually made it to market before getting discontinued. Then in 2013, Google debuted the Chromecast – a small, affordable media streamer that’s become one of the most popular Google-branded products to date. But with the debut of the Google Home connected speaker, the search giant is trying something a bit different.
Google Home is meant to be a jack-of-all-trades device. You can speak to it, ask it questions, tell it to add things to your grocery list, play music through it, and even tell it to turn off the lights. It can even talk to your Chromecast, Nest Thermostat and a few other IoT devices to make your life a bit easier.
But is this a device you actually need? We’ve been using Google Home for a few days now, and there are some things you should know before running out and buying one right away. Here are our first impressions on the new Google Home.
Related:
How to set up and use Google Home
2 days ago
Build quality is great, for what it’s worth
You probably won’t be carrying around your Google Home too often, but it’s worth noting Google’s new smart speaker is very well built. Yes, it’s made mostly of plastic, and it may look a little like an air freshener, but it blends in quite well no matter which room of the house it’s in. It doesn’t really look like a speaker, either, especially compared to its biggest competitor, the Amazon Echo.
If you’re not a fan of the default White Slate model (the one we’re reviewing), Google has a variety of base color options to choose from at the Google Store.
See also:
More Google Home base colors now available starting at $20
2 days ago
Sound quality is actually pretty good
Google Home is a connected speaker, after all, so sound quality better be good. And from what we’ve experienced thus far, it’s very good.
Google Home has a total of four speakers, which can be found under the detachable speaker grill. Overall, when it comes to playing music or listening to podcasts, sound quality is actually really good. The speakers provide low bass and clear highs, and we haven’t really experienced any major downfalls in the overall quality of sound.
Perhaps the only thing you should watch out for is turning the volume up too high. The sound starts to crackle quite a bit when the volume is turned up to max, but thankfully it has to get pretty high before this becomes a noticeable problem.
App support is limited, but Google Assistant helps make up for it
As of right now, Google Home only supports a handful of apps, and only about half of them are from third parties. Google Play Music, YouTube Music, Keep, Calendar and YouTube are all supported, and so are a handful of other third-party services like Spotify, Pandora and TuneIn. But just because an app is compatible with Google Assistant, that doesn’t mean you get all the functionality out of that app that you’d expect.
Just because an app is compatible with Google Assistant, that doesn’t mean you get all the functionality you’d expect.
Take Google Calendar, for instance. You can ask Google Assistant to give you a daily briefing based on the events in your calendar, but you can’t actually add calendar events to your schedule using your voice, nor can you set reminders. If you think about it, this makes sense; you don’t want everyone in your house adding random things to your calendar whenever they feel like it. We understand why this functionality isn’t put in place yet, but it’s still unfortunate that Google couldn’t get this figured out before launch.
We would have really liked to see Google’s own services be integrated a little better. Google Assistant is only able to add items to your shopping list in Google Keep, and asking what podcasts are available in Play Music is like pulling teeth, for instance.
If you have a favorite app that’s not supported yet, though, you may be in luck – Google Assistant is also compatible with IFTTT, which means even though third-party app support is pretty scarce at the moment, IFTTT might be able to help bridge that gap. For instance, Twitter doesn’t have Google Assistant support yet. However, you can still ask Google Assistant to post something to Twitter, as long as you have IFTTT set up. The same thing goes for other apps – want to add a task to Todoist? Just set it up in IFTTT, and Google Assistant will be able to add tasks whenever you ask it to.
For a full list of IFTTT channels compatible with Google Assistant, head here.
Related:
Which apps have Google Home support?
October 8, 2016
What really makes Google Home interesting is the handful of smart home apps and services that work with it
What really makes Google Home interesting is the handful of smart home apps and services that work with it. You can control your Nest Thermostat, Chromecast, Philips Hue lights or Samsung SmartThings devices all from your Google Home. Out of this list, most people are probably going to be using Google Home in conjunction with a Chromecast device, since smart thermostats and lightbulbs are still sort of niche products. Telling your Google Home to play a YouTube video on your living room Chromecast sounds really cool in theory, but it’s sort of weird in practice at the moment. You basically need to know the name of the YouTube video you’d like to watch before you ask your Google Home to cast it, which isn’t really the way people watch videos on the internet. We suppose it could be useful to ask Google Home “Play the latest video from Android Authority on my Chromecast”, but for basically anything else, you’ll want to just pull out your phone and cast it that way.
While app support isn’t quite there yet, Google Assistant helps make up for it. We’ve particularly taken a liking to the My Day feature, which will walk you through the current weather conditions, work commute, your next meeting, your reminders and daily news.
Google Assistant in action
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But the fact that you have Google’s powerful Assistant on board is one of the best parts about this device. It’s conversational, meaning you can talk to it, and it feels like there’s actually someone on the other end talking back to you. It can do cutesy things like tell jokes and read you poems, but it can also perform Google searches, give you sports scores, and a lot more. Plus, it can also understand the context of multiple questions. So when you ask “How tall is the Empire State Building?”, you can follow that up with “Where is it located?”, and Google Assistant will know you’re still talking about the Empire State Building.
Multiple account support isn’t here yet
Me: “Hey Google, do you support multiple accounts?”
Google Assistant: “Sorry, I can’t help with that yet… but I’m always learning.”
If you’re planning on buying one Google Home unit for the whole family to use, there are a few things you should know. Google Home only supports one Google account at a time, which is extremely limiting in practice. This means that if you set up your Google Home with your personal Google account, everything you do with Google Home will be associated with that account. So, if your significant other asks “Hey Google, what’s on my agenda?”, Google Home will only respond with a daily briefing based on your Google account. The same goes for traffic updates, too. If someone else asks Google Home about current traffic conditions, it will respond with traffic updates based on your driving routes.
When multiple accounts are supported, Google Home will be much more useful for families
Taking things one step further, any YouTube video played through your Chromecast (via Google Home voice command) will affect your future recommendations on YouTube. Any Google searches performed through Google Home will affect future article recommendations in your Google app feed, what advertisements are shown to you on certain websites, and even how Google Assistant interacts with you on your new Pixel or Pixel XL.
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Google Pixel XL review: a Pixel’s perspective
2 weeks ago
There is one exception – Google Home does support multiple accounts with music services, but everything else will still be tied to your personal Google account. Sure, you can blacklist certain apps and services like Google Calendar or Gmail from being accessed by Google Home, but that means you need to switch it off completely, meaning nobody can access those services.
Note: There’s a handy Google Home FAQ page here if you need more details on accounts and services.
Google Home is a pretty amazing product, but there’s certainly room for improvement. What if, one day, Home would be able to tell the difference between each user, and associate different accounts and services based on who’s talking? That’s actually touched on in Google’s FAQ page:
Currently, we don’t have an ability to differentiate users by different voice patterns. Here’s more about data security and privacy on Google Home.
While it isn’t possible with this first iteration of Google Home hardware, it’s probably going to happen sometime in the future. And when it does, Google Home will be much more useful for families.
Google Home will be a great product, but right now it’s just a good product. And as the list of third-party applications and services grow, so will the value Google Home brings to consumers. It might not change any lives just yet, but Google Home is a necessary step in creating a more connected home.
We’ll have more nitty-gritty details for you in our full review, which will be here in a few days. But for now, tell us – have you used Google Home yet? If not, are you planning on buying one for yourself in the future? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
Google machine learning can protect endangered sea cows
It’s one thing to track endangered animals on land, but it’s another to follow them when they’re in the water. How do you spot individual critters when all you have are large-scale aerial photos? Google might just help. Queensland University researchers have used Google’s TensorFlow machine learning to create a detector that automatically spots sea cows in ocean images. Instead of making people spend ages coming through tens of thousands of photos, the team just has to feed photos through an image recognition system that knows to look for the cows’ telltale body shapes.
Like most current machine learning experiments, this isn’t completely accurate. An initial version could spot 80 percent of the sea cows that had been confirmed in existing photos. If performance improves enough, however, it would be much easier for scientists to both measure the size of endangered sea mammal populations and track their movement patterns. That, in turn, could lead to more targeted conservation efforts that could save a given species from extinction.
Source: Google
Twitter COO Adam Bain steps down
This afternoon Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer Adam Bain announced in a series of tweets that he is leaving the company after six years “and a once-in-a-lifetime run.” Listed second under CEO Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s management page, Bain was in charge of building the company’s advertising business. His departure comes after weeks of turmoil for the company, including rumors of a sale and hundreds of layoffs. A Bloomberg report in October signaled an internal struggle with CFO Anthony Noto taking more control, and he will replace Bain in the COO position.
Developing…
Source: Adam Bain (Twitter), Twitter (press release)
How to spot fake iOS and Android apps – CNET
Juan Garzón/CNET
The New York Times and New York Post discovered hundreds of counterfeit shopping apps in Apple’s App Store. This is also a problem we have seen in Google’s Play store. While some of these apps will display annoying banner ads, others could have more serious consequences.
Some apps may contain malware that could steal personal information. Scammers could also benefit from unsuspecting customers entering credit card information in these bogus apps.
Here are a few tips to help you identify the real apps from the fake ones:
- Check to see who published the app. Be careful, though, scammers will use similar names; such was the case for Overstock.com (real) and Overstock Inc (fake).
- Check the reviews in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play store. A real app will likely have thousands of (hopefully positive) reviews, while a fake one will likely have zero.
- Look at the publish date. A fake app will have a recent publish date, while the a real one will have an “updated on” date. For example, that fake Overstock app was only published on October 26 of this year.
- Check for spelling mistakes in the title or description. Many of these apps come out of China. Take extra caution if it looks like English isn’t the developers’ first language.
- Beware of apps that promise shopping discounts. Sound too good to be true? It probably is.
- When in doubt, visit a store’s website in your browser and look for an icon or button that reads “Get our app.” This will take you to the App Store or Google Play store where you can download the correct app.
Smashing the Battle review: Mow through murderous robots like a badass
It’s time to smash your way through a wave of robotic enemies.
The Oculus Store on your Gear VR has tons of great games, but nothing that is quite like the glory of playing an armored up woman smashing her way through robotic enemies with a giant hammer or wrench. If it sounds awesome, it is, and it’s called Smashing the Battle. It’s a hack and slash adventure game that centers around two badass women smashing their way through the robots who have taken over the construction site.
Read more at VR Heads!
Get two Samsung Galaxy S7s for the price of one at T-Mobile
T-Mobile has a great deal for those who need a pair of smartphones.
The Galaxy Note 7 is no longer a phone you can buy. But if you’re looking to wield a Samsung device regardless, the Galaxy S7 is absolutely the next best thing.
T-Mobile subscribers, this weekend your carrier is offering you a buy one, get one free deal on Samsung’s flagship. Beginning Friday, you’ll get a free Galaxy S7 if you buy one on an equipment installment plan. The second Galaxy S7 will be free based on 24 monthly bill credits. However, if you cancel your service before those two years are up, you’ll have to pay off the remaining balance.
If you’re looking for a deal to equip you and your loved one with a pocketable, powerful little device, the Galaxy S7 is definitely worth your consideration.
Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge
- Galaxy S7 review
- Galaxy S7 edge review
- U.S. unlocked Galaxy S7
- Should you upgrade to the Galaxy S7?
- Best SD cards for Galaxy S7
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Small number of Pixel users reporting LTE problems
A minor problem for the Google Phone.
Google’s new Pixel phone has been pretty free of controversy since its release last month. No show-stopping software bugs; no severe hardware issues.
Google has acknowledged the problem, but isn’t saying specifically what is the outright cause.
But like any phone release, there have been a few waves of protest by people saying their device isn’t working well in a particular situation. One such situation is on several South American and Canadian carriers that rely on Band 4, also known as AWS, to transit signal over the air. According to a number of Pixel and Pixel XL owners, their phones have trouble staying connected to the network on that band, but the problem is not consistent nor does it appear to be widespread.
Many of the complainants live in South America, and subscribe to carriers like Claro that rely primarily on Band 4. Other people, such as Telus and Bell customers in Canada, have the same problem, but Band 4 is one of four possible frequency combinations used in many larger cities.
Google has acknowledged the connectivity instability, but isn’t saying specifically what is the outright cause — and Google may not know, because it may go deeper down the rabbit hole, into the X12 baseband drivers supplied by Qualcomm.
The bigger problem is that with connectivity issues, it is often a caused by a combination of factors — signal strength, interference, handoff instructions, carrier aggregation protocols — that can’t be traced to just one source. In other words, people are saying “the problem is with Band 4,” but it’s more likely that the problem is with merely most pronounced on that frequency. In the U.S., T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon operate parts of their network on Band 4, and we haven’t heard of any Americans with this problem.
Throughout our testing the Pixel’s signal came through strong and consistent, and we could not reproduce the issue.
Here at Android Central, we tried to simulate the issue on a number of devices, including those on T-Mobile in the U.S. and Bell in Canada. Throughout our testing, the Pixel’s signal came through strong and consistent, and we could not reproduce the issue.
If you’re experiencing LTE problems on the Pixel, let us know, but also know this: it is almost definitely a software problem and will almost certainly be fixed in a coming update.
Google Pixel + Pixel XL
- Google Pixel and Pixel XL review
- Google Pixel XL review: A U.S. perspective
- Google Pixel FAQ: Should you upgrade?
- Pixel + Pixel XL specs
- Understanding Android 7.1 Nougat
- Join the discussion in the forums!
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