Apple Watch refurbs lower the cost of outfitting your wrist
You no longer have to wait for a sale to snag an Apple Watch at a more reasonable price. Apple has quietly started selling refurbished Series 1 and Series 2 models through its American online store, lowering the barrier of entry if you don’t insist on untouched wristwear. They’re currently the most common models, to no one’s surprise (no ceramic Apple Watch Edition here), but you’re getting a sizable 15 percent discount over brand new: Series 1 begins at $229, while the GPS-equipped Series 2 variants start at $309. The Series 2 lineup also includes a few stainless steel versions starting at $469.
These aren’t the lowest prices we’ve seen. At the height of the holiday shopping frenzy, you could buy a Series 1 for under $200. With that said, these discounts are considerably more reliable… and importantly, they lower the official cost of entry for the Apple Watch world. While we wouldn’t exactly call $229 an impulse buy, it’s considerably more palatable if you’re not sure about this whole smartwatch thing and would rather not spend more than necessary.
Via: 9to5Mac
Source: Apple
Facebook simplifies Android SMS verification
Facebook has rolled out a new system aimed to make logins easier for its users and, by extension, its ad partners. The latest developer Account Kit SDK now includes instant verification, a two factor system that lets you skip the usual drill of receiving an SMS and then entering a code. When you attempt a Facebook login for a third-party site and enter your phone number, “we attempt a match with the verified phone number listed on the person’s Facebook profile,” the company said in its developer blog.
The system only works if you’re logged into the Android Facebook app on the same device. If so, it can verify without sending a one-time password via SMS, and if not, you’ll receive a text on your smartphone and will need to enter it on the other device. “This feature is used only to improve the verification process in a secure way and no additional Facebook information is shared with the app,” the social network adds.
Instant verification produces a 97 percent conversion rate, making it highly likely that users will successfully log in to partner sites. Facebook ads that it’s particularly useful “in areas of the world where SMS delivery is not reliable.” Citing partner Familonet, it says the instant verification method boosted conversion rates by five percent.
That’s a nice convenience for Facebook’s users and partners, but is it secure? Instant verification still relies on SMS, which isn’t exactly a panacea, as the US government recently said. The alternative is custom apps that generate much more secure codes like Google’s Authenticator, or even hardware dongles that work in a similar way. For now, it’s still the best bet for keeping you secure, along with a non-terrible password.
Source: Facebook
Google employee sues company for ‘illegal’ confidentiality policies that violate labor laws
Google’s motto is ‘don’t be evil.’ Google’s illegal confidentiality agreements and policies fail this test.
A Google product manager has accused the company of violating California labor laws via its restrictive confidentiality policies. According to The Information, the employee filed a suit with the California Superior Court in San Francisco, alleging that Google is running an internal “spying program” that encourages employees to report co-workers suspected of leaking information to the media.
The lawsuit also states that Google’s policies prohibit employees from reporting illegal activities within the company, even to its own attorneys. There’s also a policy that prevents employees from writing a novel about working for a Silicon Valley corporation without getting approval from Google.
One of the reasons for the stringent policies is to ensure that confidential information isn’t leaked to the press. Anyone found guilty of doing so would be terminated, according to the lawsuit. The suit also says that confidential information is classified as “everything at Google,” which prevents employees from talking about their workplace conditions with the “press, members of the investment community, partners, or anyone else outside of Google.”
If Google is found to be guilty of the alleged 12 violations of California’s labor laws, it could payout as much as $3.8 billion in total, with 75% of the penalty collected by the state and the rest distributed to Google’s 65,000 employees. That comes out to $14,600 per employee.
Here’s a full copy of the lawsuit, as obtained by The Verge:
Twitter’s search results are now sorted by relevance
Earlier this year, Twitter started moving away from the reverse chronological timeline and started prioritizing algorithmically “relevant” tweets in order to keep users more engaged. Starting today, Twitter will now be ordering its search results the same way in hopes that more relevant results will improve the search experience as well.
Lisa Huang, a senior software engineer on Twitter’s Search Quality team, explained the reason for the change in a blog post by pointing out that Twitter moves fast and the most recent results may not be the exact tweet you were looking for. (When you’re looking up a tweet with an original joke, for example, but search only turns up the endless quotes and retweets.)
In order to decide which tweets to show, Huang’s team has been testing a variety of factors to perfect the results layout as well as the machine learning model that actually ranks the results. But it is ultimately what you (and everyone else on Twitter) click on that gives Twitter its definition of what is relevant.
“A person’s behavior on Twitter provides an invaluable source of relevance information,” Huang wrote. And Twitter has data showing everything from which tweets you’ve seen to which tweets you’ve interacted with and how you interacted with them. “Using this information,” Huang continued, “we can train machine learning models that predict how likely a Tweet is to be engaged with.” Those machine learning models then rank “relevant” tweets based on the probability that users will engage with it.
While it make sense that everyone wants to see the most appropriate information to their search, the fact that a tweet is likely to get a lot of retweets doesn’t necessarily make it relevant either. To show the new results page in practice, Twitter offered a side-by-side of comparison of the old layout (below left) versus the new (right) for a search of #MrRobot. While the new page is less cluttered, at least in this example it also seems to favor the brands and official accounts while pushing individual users further down the page.
Via: VentureBeat
Source: Twitter Blog
Mark Zuckerberg shows off his ‘Jarvis’ home AI in two cute videos
In case you haven’t heard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is designing a J.A.R.V.I.S. for his home, and he’s just released adorable concept videos to demo how it would ideally work.
Okay, so it’s not the actual highly advanced computerized AI featured in the Iron Man films, but it’s similar. In fact, it’s even called Jarvis. After detailing his work on the project, Zuckerberg released one video to showcase some of the real-life tasks that Jarvis can theoretically do. It’s like a souped-up Google Assistant or Amazon Echo, but with actor Morgan Freeman’s voice.
Zuckerberg’s Jarvis system isn’t as useful or functional as the one depicted in the clip. The whole idea is for us to get a better look at Zuckerberg’s vision of a robot assistant. The video is full of awkward dad jokes from Zuckerberg, plus we get an inside look at his life with his wife and new daughter. We even get to see that T-shirt cannon he rigged up in his house.
Zuckerberg also posted a second video to show a fictionalised account of how his wife, Priscilla, interacts with Jarvis. But, this time, Arnold Schwarzenegger is the original voice of Jarvis. Check out Zuckerberg’s post detailing Jarvis if you want to know more about the AI. The CEO claimed AI is closer to being able to drive cars and even cure diseases than one might expect.
7-Eleven of all places was first to trial US commercial drone deliveries
The 7-Eleven convenience store chain has just shed some new details on its drone delivery project, and apparently, 77 customers in Nevada have now received drone-delivered items from 7-Eleven to their doorsteps.
The company has been testing drone flights from a store in Reno. Roughly a dozen select customers within a mile of the shop have had their goods dropped off via drones, which are from 7-Eleven’s partner, drone maker Flirtey. The delivery pilot marks the first regular commercial drone delivery service to operate in the US. Keep in mind the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s initial drone regulations essentially prohibited commercial drone deliveries, because they said drones must stay within a pilot’s line of sight and cannot fly directly over people.
- How does Amazon Prime Air work and where is drone delivery available?
But the FAA has been working with private companies to develop broader rules. In September, for instance, UPS announced it started testing the use of drones for urgent deliveries in hard-to-reach areas in the US. Still, 7-Eleven has beat Alphabet’s Project Wing and Amazon’s Prime Air to the punch when it comes to regular commercial drone deliveries, though Amazon recently demonstrated its first delivery to a customer in the UK. In July, the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) provided Amazon with permission to test drone operations in rural and suburban areas.
While Amazon’s drone delivery was held in the UK countryside, the 7-Eleven drone delivery pilot was held in November in populated urban and suburban areas. Customers ordered food and beverages and over-the-counter medicines. The drones used a GPS system to locate the customer’s house and lowered the packages to the ground. Deliveries were completed within 10 minutes after the orders were placed, Recode said.
Per regulations, all the deliveries happened within the line of sight of the drone pilot, but the drones flew autonomously. In October, NASA and the FAA conducted tests in Reno to research a low-altitude air traffic control system that allowed pilots to watch their drones in the air the entire time. Air traffic control for drones will be a major component of drone delivery in the US before they roll out on a larger scale.
Project Wing once held an one-off trial in the US, where a single drone completed a delivery test. 7-Eleven’s is more significant because it included 77 drone deliveries over a month period.
FTC tells Verizon ‘supercookie’ partner to give you an exit
Verizon (aka our corporate overlords) may have settled with the FCC over its seemingly inescapable “supercookie” web tracking back in March, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The carrier was sending that information to a third party, Turn, which used it for ad purposes. What about its fate? Well, now we know: Turn has settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges that it deceived web surfers by tracking them even when they took steps to avoid monitoring. The company not only has to properly disclose the nature of its tracking, but offer an “effective” opt-out. In the “supercookie” days, the opt-out only worked for mobile web browsers, not ads within apps — that shouldn’t be a problem following the FTC order.
It’s not as ideal as an opt-in solution, but that may not be as much of an issue when Verizon’s FCC settlement required that it make its tracking strictly voluntary. No, the settlement won’t make anyone forget that Verizon prioritized ad dollars over users’ privacy. It will, however, give you a way to reduce the number of targeted ads in your life.
Via: Consumerist
Source: FTC
AT&T Debuts ‘Call Protect’ Service to Protect Against Robocalls
AT&T today announced Call Protect, a complementary service aimed at protecting its users from automated phone calls, also referred to as robocalls. The service debuts five months after the U.S. Federal Communications asked wireless companies to offer free robocall blocking services.
The service offers two solutions to stop robocalls. It can automatically block numbers suspected of fraud at the network level, preventing them from reaching your phone entirely, or it can deliver the call from a suspected number with a fraud warning on the display. The latter feature requires the user to be in an area with HD Voice support.
AT&T customers can activate the feature via their MyAT&T account or by downloading the AT&T Call Protect app. The app allows users to look at call details, receive spam warnings, block specific numbers and turn on and off Automatic Fraud Blocking.
The service requires an iOS or Android smartphone eligible for HD Voice. AT&T also warns that automatic blocking may block wanted phone calls, which means users would potentially have to manually whitelist certain numbers to make sure they aren’t blocked.
In August, it was reported that Apple was one of over 30 companies that joined the “Robocall Strike Force,” a join effort aimed at stopping robocalls. At the time, the FCC said that most of the complaints it receives are regarding robocalls. The U.S. has other measures in place to prevent robocalls, including companies having to ask permission before calling and allowing people to add their number to the FTC’s Do Not Call list.
AT&T Call Protect is available on the App Store for free [Direct Link]
Tag: AT&T
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Crytek is closing studios and slow-paying employees again
Crytek, the developer behind the technically impressive CryEngine toolset, and most recently Robinson: The Journey, is laying off employees and closing studios. Workers’ paychecks have reportedly been extremely slow to arrive as well. No, you aren’t imagining things — the company faced similar circumstances a few years ago. But the bloodletting appears much worse this time out: All of the company’s studios will be shuttered but two.
Specifically, Crytek’s offices in Budapest; Istanbul; Seoul; Sofia, Bulgaria and Shanghai will be closed. Studios in Frankfurt and Kiev will remain open.
In a press release, co-founder Avni Yerli said “these changes are part of the essential steps we are taking to ensure Crytek is a healthy and sustainable business moving forward that can continue to attract and nurture our industry’s top talent.” Until it comes time to pay them, apparently.
Kotaku reports that employees at the company’s main studio in Frankfurt haven’t received paychecks in three months, and that offices in Budapest and Sofia have gone without pay as well. The publication’s sources said that payments have been late all year long and that management has been incommunicative about the reasons why, or when payment will happen.
Employees were paid wages for October as of last week, according to Eurogamer, while November pay will supposedly arrive this week. The money may have come from Russian internet company Mail.ru, which is rumored to buy Crytek’s free-to-play shooter Warface and its unannounced sequel come January, the publication said.
When facing a similar situation in 2014, Crytek old off its UK studio to Metro: Last Light publisher Deep Silver, along with the rights to Homefront: The Revolution. That game was shoved onto market this past May, following additional delays post-purchase. It has a rating of 48 (out of 100) on Metacritic, and a 3.8 user score.
Via: Eurogamer
Source: Crytek
Sling TV accidentally reveals its set-top box for cord cutters
The Sling TV team has inadvertently spilled the beans on its previously leaked media hub for cord cutters. Zatz Not Funny discovered a briefly available landing website for the AirTV Player, and it’s clearer than ever that Sling (read: Dish) is catering to those determined to leave cable and satellite behind. The set-top box will revolve around a home screen that merges over-the-air TV tuning with not only Sling TV, but Netflix — you won’t have to jump between apps or devices to watch both your local news and the latest season of Black Mirror. And since this is an Android device (notice the “G” button on the remote), there’s a good chance that other online services will be available as well.
It’s not certain how much the AirTV Player will cost or when you can get it in your hands. However, a launch at CES in January seems likely given that Dish tends to have a major presence at the trade show. It could be a big deal if there aren’t any rude surprises in the pricing or execution, though. Until now, you’ve typically needed a separate over-the-air TV tuner device (like Nuvyyo’s Tablo DVR) if you wanted local live programming wrapped in a slick interface. That won’t be necessary here, as you can just buy one gadget that covers both your local TV and streaming needs. No matter how well it works, it’s clear that Dish wants to give you as many reasons as possible to skip rivals like PlayStation Vue and DirecTV Now.
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Zatz Not Funny
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