Google is moving away from its self-driving bubble cars

Alphabet’s Larry Page has decided to tweak Google’s ambitious driverless car strategy and make it a lot more feasible, according to The Information. The tech giant has reportedly decided to scrap its plans to manufacture autonomous vehicles with no steering wheels and pedals, like its bubble-shaped prototypes called “koala,” at least for now. It’s new and more realistic approach involves giving its self-driving tech the Android treatment: it has apparently chosen to collaborate with automakers to create driverless cars with pedals and steering wheels that use Google’s technology.

Google has been having a hard time launching a business out of its autonomous car efforts, and Larry Page wants to change that. The big G even hired an Airbnb and a Hyundai exec to spin the self-driving car unit out of Google’s experimental X labs and to turn the project into a business. Now, The Information says Google’s parent corporation Alphabet is expected to announce a new company soon, thanks to this new plan.

By pairing up with automakers, the tech giant can realistically launch a ridesharing service composed of autonomous vehicles as soon as 2017. However, it still depends on how its Chrysler prototype performs. If you’ll recall, Google joined forces with Chrysler to load Pacifica vans with its driverless tech, and they’ve begun testing out the prototypes a few months ago.

Source: The Information

Neil Young’s Pono will launch an adaptive bitrate streaming service

Neil Young could be about to launch the most interesting streaming service to come along in a long while. No, really.

Young recently spoke at length with Rolling Stone’s Music Now podcast. While mostly discussing music, he also divulged his future plans for Pono. Launched in 2014 on Kickstarter as a high-resolution music player and download service, Pono captured the imagination of select audiophiles and not many others. Its total sales were in the tens of thousands as of last year, and its download service is in hiatus after the company running it was acquired.

Now, Young’s company is planning a streaming service. What’s interesting about it is not the fact that it’s promising to stream 192kHz, 24-bit resolution audio. Although it totally is. No, what’s interesting is that it’s promising high-quality adaptive bitrate streaming, which would be a first for a streaming service.

See, when you load up your music app of choice, you typically pick a bitrate for downloads, and a bitrate for streaming. In Spotify, for example, you can choose from anywhere between 96kbps and 320kbps bitrates for streaming and downloads. What Pono is proposing is to do away with those designations.

Spotify’s streaming maxes out at 320Kbps.

The service will offer the highest quality the artist and label offers. Sometimes that’ll be 192kHz, 24-bit, sometimes it’ll be 44.1kHz, 16-bit (aka CD-quality, or what Tidal offers). That’ll be the default. If you don’t have the bandwidth required to support that bitrate — 192kHz, 24-bit can be as high as 9Mbps — six times that of Tidal and around 30-100 times more than Spotify — then the stream will seamlessly step down in quality, down to CD, through FLAC and all the way down to something like OGG or ACC at 128Kbps.

Exactly how this will work isn’t clear. It seems likely that every song will be encoded at many rates and then cut into small segments, each a few seconds long. Then, depending on the speed of the connection and the length of your streaming buffer, the Pono app would choose between the various bitrates on the fly. “You’ll be able to move around and there won’t be any break in the music, but the resolution of the sound will change and you’ll be able to tell what happens when you look at your screen,” Young told Rolling Stone.

“…There won’t be any break in the music, but the resolution of the sound will change.”

Users will have some exposure to adaptive bitrate from YouTube and Netflix — we’ve all experienced a crisp video suddenly turning into a pixelated mess at one point. The effect would be jarring if you were suddenly kicked from a 9Mbps lossless file down to a 128Kbps stream, but in reality it’s more likely you’d jump between 9Mbps, 4Mbps, 2Mbps, et cetera in smaller increments. To me, the difference between all these encoding methods is nigh impossible to hear, which is both a good and a bad thing. On one hand, it’ll make the experience pretty seamless, on the other, it kind of negates the point of a super-high quality streaming service in the first place.

Apple Music’s quality slider.

Young hopes that this adaptive bitrate streaming method will “educate people on the difference between high-resolution music and regular streaming level music, which would be the bottom level for our streaming service.”

Hopefully other streaming services will take note. It’s not like Pono is about to persuade the many, many paying subscribers of Spotify and Apple Music to jump ships. But these services could learn a little here. It’s incredibly annoying to have a song cut off when your data connection can’t support 320Kbps audio, but would probably be fine at 192Kbps. Spotify does offer an “automatic” bitrate option, but it tops out at 96Kbps. As far as I can tell (I’ve reached out to Spotify for clarification) it’s not adaptive in the same way.

One big question left to answer for Pono, though, is what devices the service will work with. Almost every phone lacks the ability to playback 192kHz audio through its headphone jack. Audiophiles typically use an external solution to playback the highest quality files, which would work here too.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel for those not willing to go to those lengths, though: Now that Apple has dropped the headphone jack, and other companies seem to be following suit, the onboard digital-to-analog-converter (DAC) is bypassed in favor of one inside the headphones. That means if your Lightning, USB-C or wireless headphones support 24-bit/192kHz audio you won’t have a problem.

When exactly Pono will launch or even formally reveal the streaming service isn’t clear. (Nor is how much it will cost). Young says Pono is working with a Singaporean company to enable adaptive bitrate streaming, while negotiating the necessary audio rights to fill the service with music. Given the original Pono made an appearance at CES 2015, and the electronics show is just a few weeks away, there’s hope it could come soon, and hopefully push more-conventional streaming services into upping their game a little.

Via: The Verge

Source: Rolling Stone

UK police crack down on people paying for DDoS attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are on the rise, affecting individuals, private businesses and government-funded institutions alike. As part of a large warning to cybercriminals, the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has arrested 12 individuals for using a DDoS-for-hire service called Netspoof. “Operation Vulcanialia” targeted 60 citizens in total, and led to 30 cease and desist notices, and the seizure of equipment from 11 suspects. The NCA says it had two focuses: arresting repeat offenders and educating first-time users about the consequences of cybercrime.

The work formed part of Operation Tarpit, a larger effort co-ordinated by Europol. Law enforcement agencies from Australia, Belgium, France, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US targeted users of DDoS tools together, resulting in 34 arrests and 101 suspects being interviewed and cautioned. The UK’s contribution was spearheaded by intelligence gathered by the West Midlands Regional Cyber Crime Unit, and executed by Regional Organised Crime Units under the watchful eye of the NCA. Some of the arrests were detailed in a press release — all but one was under the age of 30.

Netspoof allowed anyone to initiate potentially devastating DDoS attacks from as little as £4. Packages soared to as much as £380, however, depending on the user’s requirements. It meant almost anyone, regardless of their technical background, could take down sites and services by flooding them with huge amounts of data. The trend is representative of the increase in cybercrime and how easy it is for people to wield such powers. DDoS attacks aren’t comparable to hacking, but they’re still a worrisome tactic for businesses. Knocking a service offline can affect a company’s finances and reputation, angering customers in the process.

Twelve arrests is by no means insignificant, but it almost certainly represents a small number of DDoS users. Still, it’s a warning shot from the NCA — it’s aware of the problem, and officers are putting more resources into tracking those who both use and facilitate such attacks on the internet.

Via: Ars Technica

Source: Europol, NCA

Pokémon GO Officially Launches in India Tomorrow

Monster chasing phenomenon Pokémon GO is finally coming to India, it was announced today (via Mashable). 4G LTE carrier Reliance Jio has partnered with Niantic, publisher and developer of Pokémon GO, to bring the hit game to the country on Wednesday.

The partnership will see thousands of Reliance Digital Stores and other affiliated premises become PokéStops and gyms, where players are most likely to discover the game’s iconic characters.

“It’s exciting to see Pokémon fans in India step out and explore their neighbourhoods in search of Pokémon and Jio’s disruptive high speed 4G LTE Network will be an excellent way to experience the game,” said John Hanke, CEO and founder of Niantic in a press statement.

Since its debut on iOS in July, Pokémon GO has been downloaded 500 million times. Despite the game not being available in India during that time, many fans in the country force-installed the game to join in the global phenomenon.

Niantic updated the game yesterday with new characters, introducing Togepi, Pichu, and other select Pokémon that were originally found in Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver.

Tags: India, Pokémon GO
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Are futuristic self-driving cars already a thing of the past? Google stops development

Google has been developing its own self-driving autonomous car for the past few years, racking up several million testing miles. But before the car could even make it onto the roads for real, Google has already decided to stop development. Perhaps the company can find another use for its 53,000-square-foot self-driving development centre near Detroit.

• Google is testing wireless charging for self-driving cars

It’s not to say Google is stopping development of self-driving technologies, but The Information reports Google has decided to instead focus on collaborating with car manufacturers rather than its own model, with the intention of developing some self-driving modes but keeping the pedals and steering wheel.

Google already had an agreement in place with Fiat Chrysler, with several others expected to follow.

The company is allegedly hoping to introduce an autonomous taxi service before the end of 2017 as a rival to Uber, although it’s not clear exactly how this service would operate or indeed where it would be active. Google is holding a media event soon to talk about its self-driving car plans, so more details can be expected then.

• Self-driving cars: 14 automakers betting on driverless cars

Google already has a sort-of Uber rival through its Waze navigation app, where you can either sign up to be a driver or a rider. Trips are limited to two per day and it’s currently only available in the Bay-area of San Francisco and Israel, where the service was first introduced.

Moto M makes its way to India for ₹15,999

The first Motorola phone with an all-metal chassis.

After an unveil in China earlier this year, the Moto M has made its way to India. The phone will be up for sale exclusively on Flipkart starting December 15 for ₹15,999 ($235). That’s for the variant with 3GB of RAM and 32GB storage. Lenovo is also selling a model with 4GB of RAM and 64GB storage for ₹17,999 ($270).

The phone offers a 5.5-inch Full HD display, 2.2GHz quad-core MediaTek Helio P15 SoC, microSD slot, a 16MP camera that’s unchanged from the Moto G4 Plus, 8MP front shooter, USB-C, Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth 4.1, NFC, LTE with VoLTE, fingerprint sensor at the back, and a 3050mAh battery. The phone also comes with a nano-coating that protects it from the occasional splash. And yes, the 3.5mm jack is intact. It’s running Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow out of the box.

Lenovo is incentivizing the Moto M with several launch day offers, including a ₹1,000 discount for those using Citibank credit cards, ₹1,000 discount on the Moto Pulse 2 Headset, attractive EMI options, and an exchange scheme that knocks up to ₹2,000 off the price of the handset.

The Moto M slots in perfectly between the plastic Moto G4 Plus and the feature-rich Lenovo Z2 Plus. Considering it’ll sell for just ₹1,000 more than the Moto G4 Plus and doesn’t have the fingerprint sensor at the front, it is definitely worthy of your consideration if you’re in the market for a budget phone.

See at Flipkart