The Morning After: Thursday, April 27th 2017

TV dinners for foodies? The beginning of the end for net neutrality? Someone beating up a poor robot? Must be a Thursday. We also hear more on the next Call Of Duty title and Amazon’s new fashion camera. Really.

Profits are up, and ‘Pokemon’ is pretty much a license to print money.
Nintendo Switch could outsell the Wii U in its first year

Nintendo’s profits are up. It’s claimed an operating profit of $1.6 billion (178 billion yen) for the last quarter, which is almost a billion dollars more than the same quarter in 2016. It’s the company’s first financial results after its Switch console went on sale, and since March 3rd, it’s sold 2.74 million units. The company believes sales will stay strong, forecasting 10 million more Switch consoles sold by this time next year. That prediction, shy of 13 million, would put it toe to toe with the total sales of its predecessor, the Wii U, over its entire lifetime.

Ajit Pai wants to do away with rules preventing throttling, blocking and paid prioritization.
FCC Chairman outlines his plan to gut net neutrality

The future of net neutrality has been uncertain since the November election of Donald Trump. His FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has made it clear he intends to scale back some of the regulations surrounding ISPs, but details have been scarce. Now we have an idea of the framework the commission will be pursuing, and it begins with revoking the classification of ISPs as a “common carrier” service under Title II, which has essentially treated the internet as a public utility for the last two years.

Drunkenly attacking a connected bot with cameras wasn’t smart.
Man arrested after knocking over a 300-pound security robot

The Knightscope’s K5 may not be the cutest robot, but that doesn’t mean drunks get to knock it over.

Return of the webcam?
Amazon Echo Look is a voice-controlled camera for fashion tips

Meet Echo Look, an Alexa-powered camera designed around taking your own fashion photos and videos. If you want to show off your daily wardrobe, you just have to ask the Look to take a snapshot — you don’t have to take a selfie in front of a mirror to get a full-length picture. And since it includes a depth-sensing camera, it can blur the background to make shots pop. The real party tricks come when you’re not sure about your outfit, however. The Look’s Style Check service blends AI algorithms with fashion specialist advice to provide a second opinion — and hopefully get you buying more outfits, you clothes horse.

It’s a step back in time for the franchise for a few reasons.
‘Call of Duty: WWII’ takes you back to Omaha Beach November 3rd

Call of Duty: WWII will launch November 3rd on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. As you might expect, the game takes place largely in Europe between 1944 and 1945, ultimately pushing toward Germany after fighting through Nazi reinforcements on Normandy Beach and through the grimy streets of France and Belgium. As for the story, there’s a big focus on the brotherhood of your squad — something captured in HBO’s Band of Brothers and Steven Spielberg’s epic Saving Private Ryan.

Mobile earnings dropped off in Q1, but it expects the Galaxy S8 will turn things around.
Samsung’s chip business kept things looking up to start 2017

Samsung’s quarterly earnings are in, showing the company’s highest quarterly profit since Q3 2013. That’s despite the Galaxy Note 7 recall, and a markdown in the price of its Galaxy Note 7, apparently because the company’s chip business (making memory, processors and camera sensors for phones) is booming. As a company, it brought home the $8.75 billion in operating profit expected, and looks forward to better results next quarter, since it will include sales of the new Galaxy S8 phones.

But wait, there’s more…

• Nomiku Sous Chef essentially offers TV dinners for foodies
• ‘White Collar’ crime tracker mocks police profiling bias
• How ‘Puyo Puyo Tetris’ tricked me into liking puzzle games
• ‘The Protectors’ shows how VR can help save African elephants

BlackBerry KEYone reaches the US on May 31st

To say that the launch of the BlackBerry KEYone has been protracted would be an understatement. BlackBerry and TCL teased the high-profile phone in January, dished out proper details in February, and has left people wondering about a specific US release date ever since. At last, you can relax: BlackBerry and TCL have revealed that the keyboard-equipped Android phone will reach both the US and Canada on May 31st. Americans will be limited to buying the $549 unlocked CDMA or GSM versions at first, but take heart — there will be carrier deals, including a Sprint launch sometime in the summer. If you thought the up front price was too much to swallow, you’ll have a way of softening the blow.

In Canada, the handset will be available through Bell, Rogers, SaskTel and Telus for $199 CAD on a 2-year contract. For context, a Galaxy S8 is typically $250 CAD on similar terms. That might give you a hint as to what you could expect for American carrier pricing — it’ll be considered high end, but might not be as expensive as certain flagships.

The US carrier deal is important. BlackBerry’s previous Android phones, the DTEK series, were virtually non-existent in the States for anyone besides business customers and dedicated fans. A carrier deal not only makes the KEYone more palatable to price-conscious buyers, it puts the phone on the map for shoppers who won’t even consider a phone if don’t see it in a local provider’s store. While the KEYone is unlikely to be a runaway hit, that exposure might help BlackBerry regain some of its long-lost reputation.

Source: BlackBerry

UK ebook sales flounder as interest in print copies rebounds

Book sales in the UK are on the rise, but not because of ebooks. Figures for 2016 released by the Publishers Association show a 7 percent rise over 2015, the largest year-over-year growth in a decade. Physical book sales were up 8 percent, however ebook sales fell by 3 percent to £538 million. The biggest contributor to the drop? What the industry calls “consumer ebooks” — novels, autobiographies and the like — which slipped 17 percent to £204 million. As The Guardian reports, the numbers suggest a shift back towards printed books. We spend much of our time on smartphones, laptops and tablets, so for many reading is an opportunity to disconnect.

“There is generally a sense that people are now getting screen tiredness, or fatigue, from so many devices being used, watched or looked at in their week,” Stephen Lotinga, chief executive of the Publishers Association said. “[Printed] books provide an opportunity to step away from that.”

That’s not to say ebooks don’t have a place in the industry. So-called “digital sales” increased by 6 percent to £1.7 billion, and now account for 35 percent of industry revenue. That’s mostly due to academic journals and professional books, which climbed 6 percent to £277 million in 2016. The ebook market is important for smaller authors who want to self-publish or write novella-length works. That breadth of titles, some of which you’ll never find in a brick-and-mortar store, is part of what makes ereaders so attractive. If nothing else, today’s numbers show that the two formats can happily coexist, facilitating readers in different, but equally valuable ways.

Source: The Publishers Association, The Guardian

Inmates used smartphones to swap child porn in prison

Prosecutors have charged a group of inmates at a federal prison in New Jersey for downloading child porn from the dark web to their smuggled phones, according to NBC News. They even stored videos and photos that show kids, including babies and toddlers, being sexually abused in a cloud account they all shared. While the prosecutors announced charging five people to the public — and all five were imprisoned for child pornography — one of them secretly collaborated with the investigation.

Based on the info they got from the wire their mole wore, the group employed lookouts positioned in every stairwell that can notify them when a housing unit’s corrections officer leaves. Since it’s a low-security prison, they didn’t have to worry about more than one guard, but they still hid their phones carefully in light fixtures, closets, under their lockers and in jacket linings.

Feds named Anthony Craig Jeffries, who’s serving 14 years for distributing child porn, as the group’s ringleader. He reportedly purchased a phone for around $900 to $1,000 and then rented it out to inmates for anywhere between $4 to $10 an hour. Jeffries and the other three were officially charged after the mole got them talking about the videos and images they were downloading from the dark web.

This is far from the first time inmates were able to hide machines from guards and use them for nefarious purposes while behind bars. Back in 2015, two inmates in an Ohio prison fixed decommissioned computers and hid them in the ceiling. They used the computers to take out credit cards under other prisoners’ names, create access cards for restricted areas and to download porn.

Source: NBC News

Spotify Turns to Blockchain Technology to Pay More Royalties to Artists

Spotify has announced its acquisition of blockchain technology company Mediachain Labs to help it reward online content owners with royalty payments.

The news, first reported by VentureBeat on Wednesday, was relayed via a Spotify press release which has since been removed from its website, explaining that the purchase of the New York-based startup was aimed at facilitating Spotify’s “journey toward a more fair, transparent and rewarding music industry for creators and rights owners”.

Mediachain is responsible for the creation of an open source peer-to-peer database and protocol for registering, identifying, and tracking creative works online. The blockchain component aims to help creators and rights holders prove they are the owner of a piece of work and receive due payment.

Spotify has faced legal trouble in the past over its failure to pay artists and publishers, which is said to be down to difficulties it has had in working out who to pay, a problem which relates especially to smaller artists and labels.

Last month, Spotify reached a $30 million settlement with a publishing group over unpaid royalties and agreed to put in place a system that guaranteed a “reasonable effort” would be made to match all music streams with creators and rights owners.

Spotify recently passed 50 million paid subscribers. The Mediachain acquisition deal – the terms of which were not disclosed – appears to be part of the company’s plan to gain wider support from the creative community as it gears up to become an initial public offering on the stock market sometime next year.

Tag: Spotify
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DJI grounded its drones in Iraq and Syria to lock out extremists

The most recognizable name in drones has reportedly stepped in to help the United States in its ongoing war on terror. As The Register reports today, Shenzhen-based DJI — makers of the ever-popular Phantom and Inspire series quadcopters — quietly created software-based no-fly zones over large parts of Iraq and Syria where ISIS fighters have been known to strap improvised bombs to commercial drones.

The NFZs were first spotted by drone threat analyst Kevin Finisterre of Department 13, who noticed the company had updated its DJI Go piloting and photography app to include a number of geofenced areas in the region. DJI already maintains a large database of NFZs to prevent hobbyists from straying into airport flight paths, military bases, historic sites, sporting arenas and other places where drones are explicitly banned. The new geofenced areas, however, only appeared in late February — around the same time Finisterre notes that Iraqi troops backed by the US were mounting an offensive in Mosul. Two of the NFZs, which Finisterre has uploaded to GitHub as a Google Earth KML file, went live on February 27th and cover all of Mosul.

On the other hand, as MIT Technology Review notes, it’s unclear whether geofenced NFZs will actually stop extremists from weaponizing quadcopters and other remote-controlled flying machines. In the case of DJI equipment, a knowledgeable coder could likely circumvent the geofence with a software hack, and many of the devices used by ISIS are homebrewed or cobbled together from parts to begin with. And, of course, there’s also the question of whether the NFZs affect Iraqi forces’ own countermeasures.

DJI has yet to publicly comment on the anti-terror NFZs, but in the past it has issued a blanket statement on the use of its devices for illegal activity. “The use of consumer-drone technology to harm anyone is deplorable,” the company wrote after one of its drones was allegedly involved in an attack last year. “Any loss of life or injury in such a manner is tragic. Those who carry out such acts should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Source: The Register

Two men admit involvement in the TalkTalk 2015 hack

Two men involved in 2015’s TalkTalk hack have pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey court in London. Matthew Hanley, a 22-year-old from Tamworth, Staffordshire, admitted to three offences under the Computer Misuse Act, including the TalkTalk hack itself and obtaining and supplying files that would “enable the hacking of websites to others.” He also confessed to supplying a spreadsheet, containing TalkTalk customer details, so that others could commit fraud. Conner Douglas Allsop, also from Tamworth, pleaded guilty on March 30th to assisting fraud and sharing a file that could help other hackers. Both men will be sentenced on May 31st.

The Metropolitan Police said Hanley was an early suspect in his investigation. He was arrested in October 2015, and while officers were able to seize his computer, they contained little information because the hacker had either used encryption or wiped them clean. Police turned to Hanley’s social media accounts and discovered conversations about his involvement in the hack, including the steps he had taken to delete any incriminating data. They also found a connection to Allsopp — Hanley had asked him to sell the TalkTalk customer data in the hope of making a tidy profit.

Police arrested Allsopp in April last year. They showed him the chat logs and the 20-year-old subsequently admitted that he had tried, unsuccessfully, to sell the customer data and information about TalkTalk’s vulnerabilities. “Hanley thought that he was being smart and covering his tracks by wiping his hard drives and encrypting his data,” Andy Gould, detective chief inspector for the Met’s ‘Falcon’ cyber crime unit said. “But what our investigation shows is that no matter how hard criminals try to conceal their activity, they will leave some kind of trail behind.”

Last December, a 17-year-old hacker was sentenced to a 12-month youth rehabilitation order for his involvement in the hack. He had used an SQL mapping tool to identify a vulnerability in TalkTalk’s website, which he then published online. The teenager was punished for multiple offences though, including cyberttacks against Manchester and Cambridge universities. Daniel Kelley, described as the “mastermind” behind the TalkTalk hack, plead guilty to hacking offences that same month. He’s being charged for fraud, blackmail and money laundering. To date, police have arrested six individuals in relation to the cybercrime.

TalkTalk’s reputation was battered by the scandal. The internet, phone and TV provider was fined £400,000 by the Information Commissioner Office and incurred costs of roughly £42 million following the breach. Chief executive Dido Harding is due to step down next month, making way for Tristia Harrison, currently managing director for TalkTalk’s consumer division. The company tried to shake its battered image with a company-wide reboot last year, which included new packages, guarantees and a fresh marketing campaign. Slowly, the provider seems to be recovering — and soon, it seems, this whole episode will finally be behind them.

Source: Metropolitan Police

NASA is running out of functional spacewalk suits

NASA already spent over $200 million on developing a next-gen spacesuit, but it’s still years away from conjuring up a working unit. That’s a bigger problem than you might think, because according to NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), the agency is quickly running out of (PDF) functional suits needed for spacewalks. The iconic white suits you see the ISS crew wearing today are the same units made for astronauts 40 years ago. They were designed to last for only 15 years, and while most of them still work, they’re already riddled with issues that make them risky to use.

Some astronauts said their eyes felt like they were burning inside the suit, while others found their gloves too easily damaged. One of the most serious incidents, though, happened in 2013, when one astronaut almost drowned during a spacewalk after the cooling system in his backpack flooded his helmet with water. That broken life-support backpack is but one of the many NASA can’t use anymore: only 11 of the 18 original units remain.

The OIG’s report says it’s concerned about the possibility that NASA’s remaining units won’t last until the station retires in 2024. It’s also worried that the agency’s next-gen design won’t be ready before then, especially since the agency cut its development’s funding. It’ll be an even bigger problem if the orbiting lab gets extended until 2028. To make sure the issue won’t affect future ISS crew members, the OIG says NASA’s human exploration unit needs a “formal plan for design, production and testing” of its next-gen spacesuits. It also recommends conducting a study comparing the costs of maintaining its current set of aging units to the costs of developing and testing a new one.

Source: NASA Office of Inspector General (PDF), AP

Google Trips gets more features for an even smoother vacation

Why it matters to you

If your existing travel-assistant app hinders rather than helps, then you might want to vacation with Trips next time around.

Summer’s just around the corner so it’s a safe bet plenty of you are already eyeing the sun cream, dusting off the barbecue, and shopping for new shades.

You might even be firing up Google’s travel-assistant Trips app to help you get the most out of your upcoming vacation. For those not in the know, Google Trips is a cross-platform app designed to help you plan and organize your … well … trips. It does this by first pulling relevant information from your Gmail inbox before laying it out in various informational tabs, namely Reservations, Getting Around, Saved Places, Food & Drink, and Need to Know. It also offers up lots of ideas on what to see and do once you reach your destination.

Having had a few months to chew over feedback following its September 2016 launch, and just in time for when most people are gearing up for a getaway, the web giant has rolled out an update for Google Trips aimed at making the app easier to use and even more useful.

First up, you can now share all your various reservations for a particular trip in a single tap. You might want to forward all the information to your travel partner, travel buddies, or kids if it’s a family vacation, so now all you have to do is hit the arrow top right and select the recipients. This beats digging up individual hotel, flight, and travel reservations one by one, as you had to do before.

Travel plans have a tendency to change just before you set off, and Trips now takes this into account. Emily Fifer, Google’s product manager of Google Trips, explains: “For those last-minute or spontaneous changes, we built in a feature that lets you quickly update and add new details for flight, hotel, car, and restaurant reservations, even when you don’t have an email confirmation.” To do this, simply tap the “+” button bottom right in the Reservations section and enter the appropriate information.

With Wednesday’s update, Trips can now pull relevant bus and train reservations from your emails to add to your itinerary. Fifer notes in her blog post that more than three million rail and bus reservations are made by travelers every week worldwide, so the decision to incorporate them into Trips is something of a no-brainer.

For many users, Trips’ strong point is its ability to pull useful recommendations for things to see and do from its vast trove of existing data, so if you’ve never tried a travel-assistant app but want to check one out, now’s the time to try out Trips, available for both Android and iOS.

DJI could be about to unveil its smallest drone yet

Why it matters to you

DJI has scored multiple hits with its drone offerings to date so we can’t wait to see what it unveils at next month’s New York City event.

Drone giant DJI sure has been busy lately.

In the last few weeks alone it’s launched the Phantom 4 Advanced, unveiled the full specs of its first-person-view drone goggles, and teamed up with Hasselblad to build what it describes as “the world’s first 100-megapixel integrated aerial photography platform.”

And now it’s prepping for a special event in New York City on May 24.

An invitation sent out to media outlets on Wednesday gives little away. “Seize the moment,” it says in large, bold letters beneath some colorful light trails. Smaller text at the bottom has DJI teasing a “big announcement,” with the word “big” in all caps.

With the emphasis on size, you might be tempted to believe DJI is preparing to unveil a drone of humongous proportions, a massive beast the size of a helicopter with propellors to match, or thereabouts. But going by recent internet chatter prompted by apparently leaked images glimpsed on several Chinese DJI-focused forums, the company’s big announcement is more likely to be about a very small drone.

The Shenzhen-based drone maker recently scored a hit with its diminutive Mavic machine that wowed reviewers as much for its compact size as its myriad of features, though the rumored incoming quadcopter would be even smaller.

It’s rumored that the new drone will be called “Spark” and come without a controller. With its asking price expected to be lower than that of the Mavic, it could go up against the likes of the Yuneec Breeze or the Parrot Bebop 2.

While there are plenty of particularly small toy drones on the market, DJI could unveil something more powerful with a decent camera and impressive specs. There certainly appears to be an interest among consumers for such a machine, evidenced by, for example, the solid backing given to the tiny Kudrone during its recent Indiegogo campaign. However, the Kudrone is more of a selfie drone, though it’s possible the Spark, if it exists, could target the same market.

At this stage, it’s fair to say that there’s no concrete evidence that DJI is about to launch its own little flying machine, but check back on May 24 and we’ll let you know the true size of its “big” announcement.