Cory Doctorow still believes technology can save us from ourselves

Cory Doctorow’s first novel for adults in over eight years is a noodle-bender of the first order. Walkaway, publishing from Tor on April 25th, envisions a future just around the corner where humans have screwed up the environment and the ultra-rich (called “Zottas” by the plebian majority) continue to screw over everyone else—sound familiar?

But then something new happens. In a world populated by drones, makers, 3d-printed food and other mundane miracles, society enters a new phase, which the author coins “post-scarcity.” If you didn’t have to work, what would you do? For the characters caught up in Doctorow’s fascinating sci-fi epic, they choose to walk away, creating their own societies in the ashes of the old world. In an early review, Kirkus Reviews calls it, “A truly visionary techno-thriller that not only depicts how we might live tomorrow, but asks why we don’t already.”

Doctorow, of course, is no stranger to the advantages and perils of technology. In addition to his primary career as the author of bestsellers like Little Brother, Pirate Cinema and Rapture of the Nerds (with Charles Stross), the author continues to co-edit the website Boing Boing (a Digital Trends partner), promote the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and generally startle his legions of fans with his ever-spiraling thoughts on futurism. This latest novel had very contemporary inspirations; Doctorow’s latest brainstorm was inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, which focuses on the emergence of altruism in the face of disaster.

More: Boing Boing beats FBI subpoena for Tor exit mode

We caught up with Doctorow at his home base in Los Angeles to see why he thinks the future isn’t dystopia, but utopia.

“Well, I enjoy a disaster story where everyone turns into a cannibalistic extra from Mad Max as soon as the electricity falls as the next guy, but those stories have also kind of been a guilty pleasure,” Doctorow told Digital Trends. “The attraction of those stories—from The Road to Escape From New York—is always that there’s a core of good people who are facing down the selfish, the mean, the violent—and they’re also usually very class and race-based in their good guy/bad guy splits. As Mr. Rogers told us, when thinks go wrong, you ‘look for the helpers.’ Rebecca Solnit made it all click for me: pretty much everyone is a ‘helper,’ but we’re so worried that the other people lack our virtue that we have this huge trust deficit.”

Technology in times of disaster

The book is also unique in that it uses real technology, ranging from drone applications to advances in bio-hacking, to imagine a world in which refugees from traditional societies employ advanced tech to make a better world—not just for themselves, but for everyone.

Today, you only ‘rent beer,’ but in the future, beer might be ‘free as in beer.’

“I wanted to write a story about how technology can be used in times of disaster to let us work together,” Doctorow explains. “The Internet has given us a lot of high-profile flame wars and trolling and such, but the Internet is primarily used by most of us to be kind to other people, strangers and loved ones alike. Writing a story about how we might consciously craft technology to give society a graceful failure mode where we use it as connective tissue to tie together our collective rebuilding seems to me to be a way to counter the kind of weaponized narrative about humanity’s fundamental evilness that carried the last presidential election.”

Changing pee into beer?

Sure, the drones and mechs and bio-identification tools in the book might seem like something out of Blade Runner or Minority Report but the book’s technological flourishes are often subtle, like the beer the walkaways make daily from ditch water. It might not be water into wine but it’s awfully close, not to mention absolutely possible. Doctorow explains his thinking.

Jonathan Worth

“I’ve been interested in the CRISPR / synth bio revolution,” he says. “Hacking single-celled organisms has been job one since we invented beer and started saving the best starter cultures, and then up through the antibiotic revolution. Since life self-reproduces, synth bio has had to contend with two nightmare scenarios: out-of-control, pathogenic reproduction of a transgenic organism that is hostile to life, and out-of-control, useful production of a proprietary organism that threatens the profits of the firm that makes it. These twin risks make synthetic life into something deeply subversive and full of rich story potential. So I posited that in the future, some fun-loving CRISPR commie could Napsterize beer by including a transgenic yeast that survived the mash, passing out of your body alive and ready to reproduce if you gave it a ‘Jesus microbe’ precursor that brought it back to life. Today, you only ‘rent beer,’ but in the future, beer might be ‘free as in beer.’ Just save your pee, add the precursor, and drink up. This also has a nice spin on the traditional apocalyptic fear-scenario of a world where we’re so desperate we might drink our own urine.”

Rethinking refugee technology

In the wake of the recent Executive Orders impacting refugees, Doctorow’s sci-fi novel is also disturbingly prescient in its portrayal of refugees caught up in an unprovoked war with society’s so-called elite.

“I’m very interested in ‘refugee tech,’ because it’s a strange market with tens of millions of ‘customers,’ often with a lot of time on their hands, who are continuously refining and tweaking designs,” says Doctorow. “It helps that refugees come from every background from medical professionals to teachers to hoteliers, etc., creating these ghastly interdisciplinary labs that combine the traditional ingenuity of prisoners with a kind of idiosyncratic, open-ended access to materials that is partly governed by capricious multi-stakeholder agencies and police forces.”

In a world populated by drones, makers, 3d-printed food and other mundane miracles, society enters a new phase, which the author coins “post-scarcity.”

Essentially, the author is arguing that the kinds of sub-cultures portrayed in Walkaway exist today; they just don’t have access to the kind of organizational aptitude or technologies to help make their lives better. Doctorow has just extended the argument.

“Integrating refugee tech into a utopian society of economic refuseniks who become a kind of voluntary refugee population let me think about how the RVs in Wal-Mart parking lots, the semi-permanent homeless camps, makerspaces, co-working spaces, and refugee camps are all coming at the same problem from different angles,” he explains. “It let me consider the peacetime uses of these technologies, to create beautiful, luxurious, cooperative spaces that serve as home, restaurant and political hubs.”

How to see the future

Like contemporaries such as Warren Ellis and Neal Stephenson, Doctorow is often portrayed as a visionary who is one step ahead of the rest of us, but the author says it often has more to do with timing than precognition.

“I’ve always written science fiction where some of the technology is stuff that is just finding its way up the Gartner hype cycle—if you’re watching that nascent stuff, you can write about it as though you made it up, and posit a thought-experiment in which it’s a big deal,” he says. “Since the hype cycle includes the peak of inflated expectations where a technology is suddenly everywhere, you often get praised for your ‘prophecy’ when the tech peaks later.”

The world of Walkaway is a fascinating  scenario, and one that has a lot of interesting things to say about a post-scarcity world.

“Post-scarcity is a funny thing,” Doctorow admits. “ Keynes thought we’d all be working three-hour days by now, and yet we work longer hours than ever. The Internet gave us a way to have all the creations of the human intellect at our fingertips, and we sued the hell out of it. First it was the record companies and then the pornographers and then the legit movie studios, and these days, it’s the scientific publishers. So the problems of ‘post-scarcity’ are all around us and they’re real and terrifying and wonderful. Writing about it is a great way to get to grips with the contemporary reality that is unfolding around us.”

A Columbia University startup wants to take wireless charging mainstream

Why it matters to you

The MotherBox allows you to rid yourself of charging your phone from an outlet.

Wireless electricity of the sort envisioned by Nikola Tesla seems to be the charging ideal which the world is striving toward. Who wouldn’t, after all, love to be able to plop down their smartphone without having to plug it into a wall socket, set it on a charging pad, or dig for the appropriate cable? Given the acute lack of such chargers on the market, you would be forgiven for dismissing true wireless charging as a pipe dream. But thanks to bright minds at Columbia University, the dream is closer to reality than you think.

Yank Technologies, a startup headquartered in Columbia University’s startup lab, developed a router-like wireless charger, the MotherBox, capable of delivering power at a distance to multiple devices simultaneously. It works without wires, a charging pad, or a dock, and doesn’t require a physical connection between the charger and smartphone. Charging takes place entirely over the air.

More: Ossia Cota can wirelessly charge electronic devices throughout your home

The MotherBox is simple to use. Once a receiver is attached to an Android device, iPhone, or another compatible smartphone, charging begins. The closer the devices are to the charging pad, the faster they charge. And from there, users can move around the MotherBox at will — the transmitter automatically compensates for obstructions. A companion smartphone app lets users customize the rate of charging and serves push notifications when connected devices begin to run low on battery.

The MotherBox and smaller MotherBox, the MotherBox mini, have ranges of up to 20 feet and 10 feet. The MotherBox mini must be connected to an outlet, while the MotherBox Mini packs a rechargeable battery that can be used on the go. Both ship with a USB cable and receiver.

The MotherBox team, helmed by Yanka and chief engineer Jin Li, has successfully completed a MotherBox hardware prototype with proprietary software, firmware, and algorithms. They are launching on Indiegogo with a $25,000 funding goal and offering early backers a discounted purchase price of $79.

More: Remote wireless charging for your smartphone could be closer than you think

Yank Technologies is not the only wireless startup attempting to make a splash. Energous’ WattUp technology enables wireless charging in various forms, including small, short-throw charging dock, a medium-distance desktop option and a long-throw base station that can beam energy from up to 15 feet in any direction. Ossia’s Cota technology can transmit power to dozens of devices simultaneously. And TechNovator’s XE base station can power a smartphone as far as 17 feet away.

But despite the competition, the MotherBox team is forging bravely ahead. “Technology today is like a sexy Ferrari that’s really low on gas. It’s beautiful and amazing, but limited in reaching its true potential. It doesn’t have to be this way,” Josh Yank, CEO of Yank Technologies, said in a press release. “We’re excited to finally showcase The MotherBox and help build the foundation for wire-free charging solutions in the years to come.”

Reinstall Windows 10 (and fix your problems) with these quick steps

Whether you’re trying to fix a serious update problem, get rid of a virus, or prepare to give away your PC, you may eventually need to reinstall some iteration of Windows 10. This can be a little confusing for newcomers since there are several ways to reinstall Windows, each of which comes with its own set of benefits. So let’s take a look at the best reinstallation options, and how to get there!

More: Windows Update just not updating? Here’s how to give it a swift kick

Backing up your data

Please, please do this. Windows 10 even makes it easy, so you don’t need to search for an additional backup tool. Just follow the basic File History steps below!

Step 1: Type “Update & Security” into the search box, or head to Settings and look for Update & Security. Once there, select the Backup option in the side bar, which will take you to your File History.

Step 2: You will see an on-off indicator in this window. If it’s on, that means File History has been automatically backing up your files — including contacts, desktop files, and files housed in your OneDrive folder — and you probably don’t have to worry. The feature will back up your libraries as well, but it may not back up all general folders, so put valuable folders into a library to save them as necessary.

Step 3: If your File History tool is not on, then create any libraries that you need to, and switch the tool on with the slider. This will immediately prompt the feature to begin creating backups. Depending on how much data you have, this can take some time, so get busy with something else and wait for the backup process to finish.

Of course, if you prefer to transfer everything to an external drive or utilize a cloud service for your backups, please do so! Whichever approach you choose, make sure nothing valuable can be lost.

Want to be a music video star? Maroon 5 lets you add yourself to its latest clip

Why it matters to you

Maroon 5 is giving its fans a shot at their very own 15 seconds of fame by letting them use their cell phones to put themselves in the group’s music video for the new single Cold.

If you’ve ever wanted to see yourself in a music video, you now have the chance. Thanks to a partnership with shared media platform Vivoom, fans of pop group Maroon 5 can to use their cell phones to put themselves in the group’s music video for the new single Cold. 

Using your phone’s camera, you can record a 15-second video of yourself by visiting the group’s website and tapping on the create button. You can then choose to film yourself on the spot or upload a video from your phone that will be cut down to 15 seconds. You can preview the video before you upload it.

More: MTV made music videos cool. Technology will make them epic

Your 15-second video is shown in three parts throughout a 25 -econd portion of Maroon 5’s Cold music video. You can be seen floating in the background of a trippy dance floor scene. At one point, a mirror image of the video you shot is beneath it as the camera twists and turns.

Once you are done watching your addition to the music video, you have an option to share a link to the video on Facebook and Twitter. You can also email and text the link to your friends. Unfortunately, you can not save your momentary experience as a music video extra directly onto your phone.

Cold is the second single from Maroon 5’s upcoming sixth studio album. The video debuted online following the band’s performance on Ellen on Wednesday. After the performance, fans were able to play around with Maroon 5 and Vivoom’s collaboration and insert themselves into the newly released music video.

Artists have been experimenting with new ways to share their latest music videos with fans. Earlier this month, Grammy Award-winner Chance the Rapper debuted his music video for his song Same Drugs on Facebook Live. More than 30,000 people watched the live-stream of his prerecorded music video.

Smart software starts your wipers when it predicts you’ll get splashed

Why it matters to you

Virtually every driver has had the scary experience of having their windshield obscured by a sudden splash of water. This smart wiper tech wants to solve that problem.

Car rain sensors are smart things. The most common ones work using an infrared beam that is directed onto the windshield from inside the car. When the glass is wet, less light is bounced back to the sensor, which triggers the wipers turning on.

However, they don’t work in every scenario.

“Most of us have experienced that scary moment when you’re trying to overtake a heavy truck on the highway under wet conditions,” Magnus Carlsson, head of autonomous driving at Swedish tech product development company Semcon, told Digital Trends. “When that happens, you sometimes get a splash on your windscreen, and it obscures your vision for a period of time. That’s something today’s car rain sensors can’t do anything about. They only act when they detect there’s water already on the windshield.”

More: Amazon’s latest patent reveals its own take on autonomous car technology

What Semcon has developed is a new piece of software for windshield wipers called ProActive Wipers (PAW). Using the camera, radar and rain sensors built into most modern cars, it figures out when large vehicles present a risk for sudden water splashes and gets your wipers ready. The camera detects possible threats and the radar figures out proximity, with the combined information then switching your wipers to maximum speed in advance.

The result? No more terrifying moment of blindness when your windshield is obscured by water.

“If it’s raining hard already, it’s not such a problem because you have the wipers activated,” Carlsson, who invented the technology, continued. “The best use-case for this would be if it’s been raining and isn’t anymore, or it’s raining slightly, but the road is still very wet. That’s when you can run into problems.”

The feature has already been evaluated under real conditions and the software could easily be implemented in today’s cars — provided a company is interested in adopting the smart tech. You’re unlikely to see this technology arrive for at least the next year, but it’s a feature we eagerly anticipate.

In the meantime, we’ll make sure to drive extra vigilantly on wet days.

Google patent describes tileable displays to turn your living room into a movie theater

Why it matters to you

Google’s edge-to-edge displays could end up in your home or office before long, eliminating bezels once-and-for-all.

Google appears to be exploring the world of big, massive, wall-mounted screens according to a patent filing published today. The patent aims to improve on an earlier patent granted to the Mountain View, California company, by eliminating bezels between tiled displays.

All right, so what will that mean in practice? As it stands, there are really three methods for creating a giant wall-mounted display. One, you can just buy a giant screen, or several giant screens and panel them together. Two, you can panel together smaller, cheaper screens, but you have unsightly seams where the bezels meet. Or three, you can just use a projector.

More: Google Fiber will downsize, likely shifting focus from broadband to wireless

If you’ve ever seen a big multi-screen display, like they have at electronics stores, or at awards shows, you know that these displays look good from far away, but the closer you get the easier it is to discern the seams between each panel. This new patent application aims to alleviate that by using “bright-edge” displays that eliminate those seams entirely.

The displays, as described in the patent application, are essentially bezel-free. The display goes from edge to edge, so if you tile two or more such displays beside one another, it’s almost impossible to determine where one display ends and another begins.

More: Newly discovered Android for Work flaw could let attackers steal data

Not everyone is in the market for a gigantic wall-mounted display made of tiled display panels, but this technology could be used to eliminate bezels on smaller, desktop displays. So a multi-screen setup doesn’t have those pesky seams in the middle. Instead, it would appear to have one continuous display surface.

Unlike some patents Google files, this one might actually become a reality in the near future. According to a similar patent from 2013, Google has been working on seamless tileable displays for a long time, so this isn’t like their eye-implant patent from last year. These things might actually make it to the market before long, or be used in a product that Google’s dreaming up. For more details, you can read the full patent here.

Tinder makes a move: Dating app may add a Snapchat-like video feature

Why it matters to you

Tinder’s acquisition of collaborative video app Wheel could mean video capability will be integrated in the near future.

You may soon be able to see a video of someone before you decide if you want to swipe right. Tinder recently acquired collaborative video messaging app Wheel.

According to reports, Tinder plans to add video features to the app, but no further details have been offered. Wheel co-founder Paul Boukadakis, along with Wheel employees, will join the Tinder team. Boukadakis told Business Insider the two companies plan on “bringing people together to create.”

More: Cheap date: Tinder will reward your emoji-only story with Valentine’s Day cash

The way Wheel works is simple: Users upload videos, usually with a theme spelled out in the title and people are able to add to the story. Users add to the story by filming themselves and uploading it to the thread. There is no option for direct messaging between users like on Snapchat, but Wheel’s best features are clearly derivative of the popular social media platform.

Wheel’s story feature is similar to Snapchat’s Live Stories, which are a collection of user videos surrounding a specific theme, chosen by Snapchat. Wheel also features a discover tab similar to Snapchat. But, instead of discovering video content from media publishers, Wheel’s discover tab is a curated list of select user content.

Tinder has been working its way toward adding more collaboration to the app. Last summer, the app introduced Tinder Social, a new feature which allows groups of people to connect with other groups planning to go out. That figures to be the best place for Wheel integration. Instead of pictures and text explaining how much fun you and your group of friends plan to have that night, a short video could suffice as well.

Wheel could also help make Tinder users more secure in their online dating conquests. Last summer, online dating app Badoo allowed its users to upload videos in an effort to weed out fake profiles and people with misleading photos. Anyone who has swiped right and wished they swiped left after meeting someone who looks nothing like their Tinder profile can understand how important video is to online dating.

Wheel is available for iOS devices here.

You can stop waiting: Microsoft’s February 2017 Patch Tuesday now happens in March

Why it matters to you

You can stop hitting that update button, because Microsoft’s February 2017’s Patch Tuesday isn’t happening until next month.

Microsoft established a fairly predictable schedule over the last decade of precisely when it issues the most important Windows updates. Known as Patch Tuesday, the second day of each month is when individuals and organization IT departments can usually plan to apply security and other updates to keep their Windows machines humming.

Every now and then, something happens to interrupt that regular schedule, usually due to some show-stopper bug that would mean an update would cause more problems than it solves. February 2017 is just such an occasion, and it’s more than just a delay of days or even weeks, as Ars Technical reports.

More: Microsoft putting Patch Tuesday’ out to pasture, promises quicker security updates one day

This time around, Microsoft is essentially cancelling Patch Tuesday completely. The company first delayed the update indefinitely, and now it’s official — the next Patch Tuesday update will arrive on March 14, 2017.

The month-long delay is particularly troublesome for anyone suffering from an SMB file sharing bug that causes crashes, along with any security updates that would have helped users avoid other issues. Microsoft had planned to implement changes to patching methodology that would have applied Windows 10’s cumulative update concept to Windows 7, 8.1, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, and Server 2012 R2. Those changes won’t happen until March 2017 as well.

Microsoft hasn’t provided any specific reasons for the delay, but the changes to the update process mean that all updates are delivered and tested together. And so, if one update causes issues, the company can no longer hold back just that update and deliver the rest. It’s now more of an all or nothing affair.

Ultimately, it’s better that Microsoft hold off on delivering an update rather than cause widespread issues. IT departments in particular might find the delay inconvenient, given that they typically plan around the updates to avoid user interruptions. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for Microsoft to fix that pesky SMB crashing bug, you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

Microsoft Garage’s Email Insights will help you find that missing message

Why it matters to you

If you’ve been spending way too much time searching for an email message, then the Microsoft Garage might just have a solution.

Microsoft’s Garage is the company’s software skunkworks of sorts, a group of developers who spend some of their working time developing unofficial and often experimental apps. Quite often, those apps are cross-platform and sometimes even exclusively for competitive platforms, and they’re usually aimed at solving a very particular problem.

The latest Garage app is Email Insights, and it’s for Windows 10 only. The specific problem that this Garage project is directed at overcoming is the challenge of finding email messages faster and more efficiently, and Microsoft provides an overview on its news site.

More: Microsoft Garage will expand to three new locations in 2017 and 2018

For now, Email Insights works with the Outlook desktop app and with Gmail — there’s the cross-platform support aspect. Once you install the app, you’re directed to select either Outlook or Gmail and the app configures itself accordingly. Once it finishes configuring itself and creating an index complete with autocomplete and fuzzy logic, you’re ready to go. You can create separate tabs that connect to both email services and switch between them as you need to search your messages.

The app’s purpose is best described by Suresh Pathasarathy, senior research developer on Microsoft Research India’s Applied Sciences team, who says, “The idea is to remove the cognitive load of a user while searching. A user need not remember all the exact keywords or spellings for their queries. Contextual fuzzy name search obviates the need to remember spellings of peoples’ names. For instance, ‘Chris’ gets corrected to ‘Kris’ and ‘Philip’ gets corrected to ‘Philippe,’ depending on your inbox.”

According to Parthasarathy, Email insights is a search companion for Outlook and Gmail. Its entire purpose for existing is to make it easier and faster to find messages that might be difficult and time-consuming to locate in other email clients. The app is best when it’s pinned to the Windows 10 taskbar, essentially moving the Outlook or Gmail search button from the application or browser to its own easily accessible spot.

As with most Garage projects, Email Insights is an experimental project that’s laser-focused on a specific task. Garage projects don’t always last forever, and so users should be aware that the tool could be discontinued without notice. One example of a Garage project that was unceremoniously cancelled is the Cache note-taking app, which is shutting down at the end of the month.

In the meantime, you can check out Email Insights by downloading it from the Windows Store. You might find that it helps you locate that elusive email that you thought you’d lost, but really was only buried in your tens of thousands of spam messages.

3D-printed miniature camera sees the world the way a bird of prey does

Why it matters to you

Miniature foveated imaging camera could lead to high-resolution swallowable pill cameras or better drone vision.

Do you want a camera inspired by the way that eagles and other winged predators see the world, with super-high-resolution at the center and then lower resolution around the edges? Of course you do.

Fortunately, that’s exactly what researchers at Germany’s University of Stuttgart have developed with a new miniature camera, capable of being 3D-printed onto a chip to form a multi-aperture camera.

This “foveated” imaging system (named after the fovea area of the eye, which offers the greatest sharpness of vision) can be used for tasks in which only the central section needs to be incredibly detailed. The setup itself consists of four different lenses, each with a different focal length and a field of view ranging from 20-70 degrees. It works by capturing images at low and high resolution at the same time, and then creating a foveated image when they are overlaid.

Foveated images can be useful for a variety of different reasons. Two big ones are compression and the speed of image retrieval or analysis. This could make it a useful tool for future autonomous cars, in which snap judgments need to be made based on image recognition.

More: German engineers 3D-printed a camera that’s smaller than a grain of salt

“What is new with this work is our ability to take advantage of the strengths of a new optics fabrication process,” lead author Simon Thiele told Digital Trends. “This approach allowed us an extensive variation of parameters on a very small scale, and enabled us to 3D print four different complex lens systems with different focal lengths in one step directly onto the image sensor.”

Due to this high level of miniaturization, Thiele said the work has a number of intriguing possible use-cases.

“The most exciting applications in my opinion are in the fields of endoscopy and drone vision,” he continued. “If we are able to supply swallowable pill cameras with optics similar to those of eagles or humans, we could improve the imaging inside the human body. Similarly, a small drone with eagle vision would probably outperform one with a normal camera.”

As to what’s next for the project, Thiele said that team must further improve the optics and print them onto smaller imaging sensors. “At the moment, the camera size is limited by the available lateral chip sizes,” he concluded. “To be useful for consumers, our approach would have to be ready for mass manufacturing. This is not the case at the moment, but possible in principle with enough funding.”