Judge sends Uber/Waymo case to DOJ for investigation

In the latest bad news for Uber, the judge presiding over its trade secrets lawsuit with Google self-driving car unit Waymo has asked federal prosecutors to investigate the case. Reuters and Bloomberg report that US District Judge William Alsup said he is not taking a position on whether or not charges are warranted, but this is the second investigation into Uber, along with an inquiry into its “greyballing” scheme. At the same time, he denied a request by Uber to take the case to private arbitration, opting to keep things in the public eye, and also partially granted Waymo’s request for an injunction.

That ruling is under seal, for now, but Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of the case, has said he’s recusing himself from LiDAR-related work while the case is ongoing. That technology, which allows self-driving vehicles to see where they’re going, is what Waymo claims he took, and if Uber has to start over it could cost the company years of time.

Source: Reuters, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, New York Times

Square off against a digital version of yourself at Nike’s Unlimited Stadium in Manila

Why it matters to you

If you’re obsessed with setting personal records, Nike’s Unlimited Stadium gives you a new and unique way to race against yourself.

Every runner wants to beat their best time. So, who better to race against than yourself? Nike answers that question with its recently unveiled Nike Unlimited Stadium installation in Manila, Philippines, where runners race against a digital avatar of themselves that runs as fast as the regular human runner.

To race against your digital self, you place a radio frequency identification sensor on your sneaker and then run a lap on the track. After the initial lap time records, a digital avatar appears on several large LED screens placed around the track. Fortunately, the avatar doesn’t speak to you, so don’t worry about being berated by a digital copy of yourself for not keeping up. Only 30 runners are allowed on the track at any given time.

Bartle Bogle Hegarty

The 200-meter installation was built by global advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s (BBH) Singapore division and takes over an entire city block in Manila. The track was purposely designed to look like the sole of Nike’s new LunarEpic running shoe and illuminates a multitude of colors while featuring the same circular drawings found at the bottom of the shoe. As of now, there’s no information regarding how long the installation plans to remain open or if Nike expects to bring it to more locations around the globe.

BBH’s Nike Unlimited Stadium isn’t its first foray into the world of Nike as the agency’s created a number of technologically impressive installations for the brand over the last few years. For a race in Jakarta, Indonesia, the agency hacked a building to display real-time data such as speed and place on the outside of the building. To promote the Nike Hypervenom shoe, BBH allowed people in Bangkok to participate in an interactive soccer match where they tried to avoid virtual defenders as they tested their agility and scoring ability.

The next time you are in Manila and want to run with someone as good as you, Nike Unlimited Stadium may have the right track.

Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2 review

Research Center:
Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2

It’s 2017, and the market for ebook readers isn’t what it once was. There have always been only a handful of major players, but Amazon has widened its gap and still reigns king. Kobo is reaching back to its well-reviewed 2014 Aura H2O to offer an alternative to the widely-popular Kindle.

Unlike the ebook reader market, the newly-refreshed 2017 Aura H20 hasn’t changed much at all. It’s still waterproof, and it has the same backlit 6.8-inch screen, with the same resolution. The major change? It loses the MicroSD card slot present on the original in favor of double the internal storage.

That’s not a bad thing, though. The new H2O’s design and features aren’t any less impressive than they were the first time around. But on some level, the H2O feels like a missed opportunity. Kobo had a chance to disrupt a stagnant market, but decidedly played it safe. The result is a competent ebook reader that delivers on its promises, but does nothing more.

Comfortable and light

The Kobo Aura H2O won’t be mistaken for a Kindle. It has a distinct, angular design that’s slightly feels more rugged than its competitors. Thick bezels border its 6.8-inch E Ink screen, and a rubberized dimpled material stretches the length of its ergonomic back cover. It’s comfortable in the palm, and exceptionally light.

Adam Balkin/Digital Trends

Adam Balkin/Digital Trends

Adam Balkin/Digital Trends

Adam Balkin/Digital Trends

The bezels provide ample room to rest your thumbs, but we would’ve liked to see Kobo trim them a bit.

The Aura H2O is minimalist. Kobo has taken care to conceal the Aura H2O’s ports and buttons, going so far as to recess the power button and move it from ebook reader’s top to its back cover. It’s not as indented as we’d like, making it a little tough to find — the more you use the device, the more you’ll get used to it.

Testing the H2O with H2O

What hasn’t changed about the Aura H2O (thankfully) is its water resistance. Just like the 2014 model, Kobo’s new ebook reader is waterproof — it ships with the company’s patented HZO Protection, which should provide up to 30 minutes of protection at a depth of three feet.

It’s comfortable in the palm, and exceptionally light.

We put Kobo’s waterproofing claims to the test by submerging the Aura H2O in a large bowl of water for five minutes. After we thoroughly dried it off with paper towels, it was good as new — the power button and the IR touchscreen worked as well as they had before, and we didn’t note any signs of damage on the charging port.

You should note the screen does become a little unresponsive, and the device has trouble registering touches until it’s completely dry. Regardless, water resistance is always a welcome feature because it increases a device’s longevity and durability. Feel free to read with the Kobo Aura H2O in the bath — something you need to be a lot more careful with when using Amazon’s Kindle ebook readers.

A crisp and sharp screen

We’re pleased to see the Aura H2O’s screen is just as crisp and sharp as the original. The resolution and pixel density is unchanged at 1,430 x 1,080 pixels and 265ppi (pixels per inch), and we found text and book covers to be sharp — sharper than the cheaper 6-inch Kindle, which has 167ppi, but not as sharp as the Kindle Oasis, which packs 300ppi (and has a higher, slightly more comparable price point).

Adam Balkin/Digital Trends

All Kindles come with a 6-inch screen size, so it’s nice to see Kobo offering a larger size for big-screen lovers who want more screen real estate.

The device features Kobo’s ComfortLight technology, which produces a bright, tonally-consistent light across the Aura H2O’s entire screen. It also boasts a Natural Light feature, which adjusts the screen’s hue (from bluish-white to orangish-grey) to minimize eye strain. We found the “bedtime” feature, which automatically switches the screen to warmer, non-blue hues at a specific time, a nice touch.

The Aura H2O performs just as well outside. Thanks to Kobo’s proprietary glare-reducing technology, it’s easy to read in direct sunlight.

Middling performance

Powering the Aura H2O is a 1GHz processor like last year’s Kobo Aura One, and it packs 512MB of RAM. That puts it more or less on par with Amazon’s Kindle ebook readers.

Feel free to read with the Kobo Aura H2O in the bath.

Despite the upgrades from the original 2014 device, the Aura H2O isn’t as snappy as we hoped. It took up to a full second longer to load books than Amazon’s 6-inch Kindle, for example, and it sometimes stuttered in menus — especially the search screen. In ebooks, the E Ink screen refreshed a little too frequently for our liking — about every six pages. For comparison, the $80, 6-inch Kindle refreshes every five pages, and the $200 Kindle Voyage refreshes every 14 pages. The Kobo Aura H2O is $180, and it’s disappointing to see it doesn’t have a page refresh rate more comparable to the competition.

One appreciable improvement is the internal storage. The new Aura H2O can store twice as many books as the original, up to 8GB worth. That translates to about 6,000 ebooks, which is more than enough for the average reader. The original did have a MicroSD card slot, which meant you could hold even more, but it’s highly unlikely anyone would ever go above 6,000 — we’re not complaining about the omission.

One-month battery life

One of the most appealing features of ebook readers is their fantastic battery life, and the new Aura H2O doesn’t disappoint. Kobo says it should last up to one month off a charger, which works out to about thirty minutes of reading each day (if you turn the page once per minute).

The battery life estimate seems spot on. We tested the Aura H2O for about a week, using it for thirty minutes to an hour each evening with the brightness set to 50 percent and Wi-Fi enabled. By day five, the battery life had dipped to about 56 percent.

Intuitive software

The easiest way to load books onto the Aura H2O is over Wi-Fi via Kobo’s store. It boasts about five million titles, the company says — about a million short of the the Kindle store’s roughly six million. It’s organized logically by section, and features curated collections (e.g., “great reads under $5”) that make narrowing down new titles easy.

The Aura H2O has the added advantage of robust support for third-party ebook formats. If you connect it to a computer via the MicroUSB cord, you can transfer ebooks in EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, and MOBI from your computer’s hard drive to the device’s internal memory.

Adam Balkin/Digital Trends

Free ebook resources like Project Gutenberg and MobileRead will work just fine. But it’s important to note that Digital Rights Management (DRM) software will prevent you from transferring most books from third-party ebook stores. Some can be converted using Calibre, a free ebook management program, but if you download an ebook from the Barnes and Noble store that’s formatted for a Nook ebook reader, for example, you’ll have trouble getting it to a format the Aura H2O can use. Sadly, ebooks from Amazon’s Kindle library are also not supported.

The Aura H2O’s software is intuitive, for the most part. We especially like the universal search feature, which trawls through the Kobo’s online store, offline downloads, saved annotations, and the built-in dictionary for book titles, authors, series, and ISBN numbers. It helpfully provides autocomplete suggestions as you type too, which comes in handy for lengthy titles like “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”

Kobo’s TypeGenius software, which powers the Aura H2O’s font-rendering engine, is impressively robust. It offers 11 fonts in 50 sizes, different weight and sharpness settings, margin and justification adjustments, in-book search, and note-taking tools. A preview window makes it easy to see changes before they’re applied, and TypeGenius’ page navigation tools make flipping back a few chapters a breeze.

The Aura H2O isn’t as snappy as we hoped.

An energy-saving feature automatically turns off the Aura H2O after a few minutes. Reading controls let you fine-tune the appearance of pages. A web browser — currently in beta — lets you peruse sites on the H2O’s screen, thought we wouldn’t recommend it — the slow refresh rate will test the limits of your patience.

The Aura H2O’s Activity feature gamifies your reading. You can see stats like how many minutes you spent reading each day of the week, how many pages you average a minute, and how much progress you’ve made in your current book. An “Awards” tab offers badges unlocked by completing tasks like creating a Kobo account, using the built-in dictionary, and reading Proust.

Warranty information, price, and availability

Kobo offers a standard limited warranty for the Aura H2O. If a defect arises one year from the date you purchased it, the company will replace it with a new or refurbished model of equal or greater value, or repair it using new or refurbished parts. You’ll have to contact Kobo to make a warranty claim and provide a proof of purchase, and ship the Aura H2O to Kobo’s repair facility.

Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2 Compared To

Kobo Aura One

Kindle Oasis

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 2015

Kindle Voyage

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2013)

Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight

Kobo Aura HD

Kobo Mini

Sony Reader PRS-T2

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite

Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet

Amazon Kindle Fire

Spring Design Alex

Barnes & Noble Nook

Sony PRS-700

The Kobo Aura H2O costs $180, and you can pre-order it now. It will be available on May 22 in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Italy, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, and Turkey. It will come to more countries later this year.

Our Take

The Aura H2O is every bit as good as the original, but we would have liked to see better performance. It’s a great option for people who prefer large-screen ebook readers.

How long will it last?

The Aura H2O’s build quality is exceptional – and the body’s waterproof.  If the first-generation Aura H2O is any indication, we expect it to last more than three years.

The DT Accessory Pack

Huasiru PU leather case

$10

Mexxprotect Ultra-Clear screen protector

$8.49

Mulbess – Kobo Aura H2O 2014 eReader eBook stand case

$15

On the software side, Kobo’s devices tend to improve over time. The company introduces experimental new features via the beta menu, and just in February rolled out a revamped home screen interface to the entire lineup of Aura devices.

Is there a better alternative?

Yes. The Aura H2O is a great ebook reader, but there are less expensive alternatives.

Take Amazon’s Kindle lineup, for example. The entry-level Kindle has a smaller display and a lower resolution than the Aura H2O, but it boasts built-in Bluetooth, and starts at $80. The next step up, the $120 Kindle Paperwhite 3, bumps screen sharpness to 212ppi and adds 3G connectivity. The larger $200 Kindle Voyage packs haptic sensors, and there’s the $290 Kindle Oasis with a two-month battery life.

The $120 Nook Touch Glowlight, another Aura H2O competitor, has a screen with 212ppi and a battery that lasts between three to eight weeks on a charge.

The biggest advantage of the Kobo, though? It’s waterproof. Other ebook readers also do not have built-in blue light filters, either.

Should you buy it?

Yes. The Aura H2O is a great ebook reader — it’s waterproof, has a blue-light filter, a large, sharp screen, and it supports a number of ebook file formats. If those features interest you, the Kobo Aura H2O is a great fit. It is a lot more expensive than the entry-level Kindle, though, so you may want to take a look at Amazon’s offerings first.

Forget Bitmoji: Allo uses neural networks to personalise emoji

Google really wants people to use its Allo chat app.

The company has just introduced a new feature that’s super reminicscent of Bitmoji, the personalised emoji service that Snap bought and integrated into Snapchat. Google’s feature is a little different, though. It uses computer vision and neural networks to build an emoji sticker that’s supposed to be based on – and look just like – your selfie. In other words, it uses algorithms to emojify your face.

• What is Google Allo, how does it work, and why would you
• Google Allo: How to set up and use it
• Google is making a desktop version of its Allo chat app

All you have to do is snap a selfie, and it’ll return an automatically generated illustrated version of you, while also providing you with customisation options to help you personalise the stickers. Jennifer Daniel, Allo’s expressions creative director, revealed in a blog post that the Allo team explored how it could enable an algorithm to pick out qualitative features in a manner similar to the way people do.

Here’s how it works: humans use context clues to determine a person’s eye colour in different lighting conditions, but computers can’t do that, so Allo relies on neural networks in order to interpret every permutation of lighting condition, eye colour, etc. The Allo team discovered that a few neurons among the millions in these networks could focus on things humans weren’t “explicitly trained to look at”.

So, because Allo uses this technology to in a sense “notice more”, it is able to create a realistic illustration of you that captures the exact qualities your friends can recognise. But rather than replicate a person’s appearance exactly, the Allo app develops a lower resolution model in the form of emoji stickers. It’s less about reproducing reality and more about breaking the rules of representation, Allo said.

Google

So, now, you can use Allo to generate personalised emojis that truly represent you, rather than relying on Snapchat’s Bitmoji, which only offers the ability to swipe through and pick characteristics like skin colour, outfit choice, and hair style.

This new feature is starting to roll out in Allo now for Android, and it will come soon to Allo on iOS.

Lighthouse home security camera uses AI to ID people and pets

Security cameras are getting more and more advanced these days, they might put a few security companies out of business. Take Lighthouse, for instance. The device, backed by an accelerator created byAndroid co-founder Andy Rubin, can figure out who’s at home or who entered the house, and whether it’s a human or the family dog/cat. When The Verge took it for a spin, the Lighthouse team showed how it responds to your questions and voice commands. Say, you want to know if anybody took the dog for a walk. You can just ask the camera, and it will send the latest video it took of your dog to its accompanying iOS and Android app.

The Lighthouse setup is composed of an RGB camera that captures 1080p videos and has night vision, a speaker, a microphone, a siren and a 3D sensor. It needs the last one, because unlike Netatmo Welcome that uses facial recognition, this one relies on 3D-sensing technology. When you first set it up, you’ll need to manually identify the shapes it sees around the house. If it detects a family member, you’ll have to tell the machine that it’s your partner, roommate, child or pet. That way, it can recognize them the next time they enter the house.

Over time, the camera also learns when to expect every family member to be around. If it detects an unknown presence at an unexpected time, it’ll send you a notification, and you can watch what’s going on through its app. It’s unclear how accurately it can identify each family member, but the company said it trained its system to be good at recognizing shapes and patterns by feeding it over a million samples. Lighthouse plans to introduce facial recognition before it officially becomes available, though.

When it comes to your privacy, the company said its system can protect your data with bank-level encryption. You’re the only one who can access your info, and the system deletes whatever your camera records within 30 days. The camera is now available for pre-order bundled with the company’s “Intelligence AI Service,” starting at $399 for one device and a year of access to the AI. Lighthouse expects to start shipping in September 2017.

Source: The Verge, Lighthouse

‘How to shoot on iPhone’ videos explain why your pictures suck

The iPhone camera has been a consistently emphasized point by Apple, and for good reason. The quality of pictures it can take increases with each iteration, and for most people, smartphone cameras have become their primary way to take photos. Of course, not all of our pictures come out looking like those highlight shots Apple uses in its ad campaigns, but several videos and a website the company just posted may help close the gap.

Most of the videos in the “How to Shoot on iPhone 7” website are vertically oriented for viewing on your phone, perfect to learn about features it has that maybe you never quite figured out how to use. Portrait mode, shooting stills during or shooting a vertical panorama are fairly easy to do, if you can find the right setting. Some of them focus on things like composition, in case you need more basic photography advice.

So, is this enough information for you to become a festival-flogging “influencer”? Probably not, but no matter phone or app you use it could help your next picture look a little bit better.

Source: Apple ‘How to Shoot on iPhone 7’

Microsoft’s design rules push Windows ‘beyond mere rectangles’

Microsoft’s Fall Creators Update for Windows 10 might have an ironically uncreative name, but the upgrade itself is flush with artistic potential and useful features. It will give users a timeline to manage complex work sessions, APIs that tie all of Microsoft’s services together and, notably, a new design paradigm intended to radically overhaul the flat rectangle user interface it’s known for. Microsoft’s Fluent Design System focuses on five core tenets to help developers build more creative and engaging user interfaces: Depth, Material, Light, Scale and Motion.

These philosophies are intended to draw a line in the sand between Microsoft’s stiff, old design and a new future of interactive user experiences. “It’s time to move beyond mere rectangles confined to a plane,” Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore declared as he introduced the design language at Build. “It’s not just about visuals, it’s about interactive models and spaces and how all this comes together.” Let’s take a quick look at each element and how it might change how Windows apps are designed.

Light

Ask any filmmaker worth their salt, and they’ll tell you all about how important lighting is in a scene. With design, it’s no different: how bright or dark an interface is can change how the user perceives it. Belfiore says it creates atmosphere, lending an app design a sense of place. That’s true enough, but when it comes to designing an interactive menu or app interface, it’s also an important tool for drawing a user’s attention. An illuminated button can teach customers how to use an app, or highlight a program feature they might otherwise pass over.

Depth

Between the classic era of gray, dull menus and the short-lived, flat “Metro” design language, Windows has almost exclusively relied on boring, square frames to present users with information and tools. With Fluent Design, Microsoft is challenging developers to kill that paradigm by breaking information and objects free of a traditional 2D frame.

Rather than presenting a flat, traditional calendar, for instance, Microsoft’s Build presentation imagined an “at-a-glance” agenda zooming in and telescoping important events toward the user — creating an illusion of depth by layering and sizing more important appointments to appear larger. The hope is that by using depth to lend interfaces the illusion of a physical environment, Windows apps will be able to keep their users engaged for longer.

Motion

A well-animated interface is an engaging one, and the Motion edict is all about keeping a user’s attention by giving them something active to look at and interact with. Belfiore likens the use of motion in Fluent Design to a director using movement to lead the viewer to the story they want to tell. “Motion design has a special power to bring all of our experiences to life,” he says, “and lead people from one task to another with a cinematic ease.”

Microsoft illustrates this with the Xbox One’s live pop-in menu, music visualization in a media player and with a motion graphics transitioning a simple graph to a more dynamic, brightly colored array of representational shapes. All examples that quickly draw the attention of the user to the task at hand, be it controlling music, managing game settings or simply keeping the viewer engaged with a dataset.

Material

Like most of Fluent Design’s core concepts, Material almost seems like a dig at the visual style of Windows’ past. The functional squares of the traditional Microsoft interface may be, well, functional, but it lacks a connection to the physical world. Belfiore suggests that the key to making users love Windows app design is to emulate the “sensory and invigorating” feel of the materials that make up the real world.

“We want to bring more of that character to our designs in the right way, with a physical quality,” he says. “Inviting people to touch and interact.” This statement could easily be dismissed as an effort to give apps more interesting textures — but with Windows 10, the idea of making a PC interface inviting to touch holds some merit. We may think of PCs as simple, traditional keyboard and mouse interfaces, but the Fall Creator Update leans hard on better voice control, better touch interaction and natural feeling stylus input. Building an interface that invites that kind of interaction makes a lot of sense.

Scale

Most of Microsoft’s new design language seems primed to improve the traditional computing environment — objects under glass controlled with peripherals and accessories. Scales is a bit different. Here, Microsoft is looking toward its own future. Specifically, the scale of digital objects used in 3D interfaces and virtual / augmented reality.

The relative “size” of digital assets happens to be something VR developers have been working on for a few years now — an object that might be properly scaled when viewed through a computer monitor might seem incredibly large or surprisingly small when viewed through an AR or VR headset. Getting the size of virtual objects right is paramount to building a good first-person interface. By challenging developers to think about the scale of their interface in terms of a 3D environment, Microsoft is asking them to imagine how their product might look through the company’s Hololens headgear.

In theory, all five of these core design tenets have the potential to help Windows developers create more robust and interactive user experiences — but what would a Fluent Design inspired Windows actually look like? Microsoft didn’t reveal much during the Build Keynote, but at the end of the style’s teaser video, a few brief examples flashed by the screen, including mock-ups for a Fluent Design calendar, and a possible new Windows desktop.

These images are almost surely just concept art at this point, but they certainly embody the core tenets of Fluent Design. This new desktop, for instance, oozes depth — with light and shadow work clearly defining where each window is within a physical space. Each object in the scene has a distinct feel, a nod to the material element that makes them feel more tangible than a standard square window. The light, depth and material elements also highlight the idea of scale between the objects, making it easy to imagine these same interface windows being projected on a wall in an augmented reality environment.

It’s too early to say for sure how Fluent Design will work out, but Microsoft is clearly thinking about its user interface in a completely new way. It’s weird and a little bizarre — but the idea that the next version of Windows could look completely different is absolutely exciting.

Be the Bane of eavesdroppers with Hushme, a mask that muffles private calls

Why it matters to you

Want to avoid potential eavesdroppers? This voice-muffling tech is the most privacy-conscious hands-free kit yet.

Want to look like Hollywood dreamboat Tom Hardy and be able to take confidential business calls without fear of being overheard? A new Kickstarter campaign has just the solution.

The good part? Thanks to some smart noise-cancelling tech, you will soon be able to confidently speak in public about your game-changing startup idea without having to worry that other people are listening in. The bad part? The Tom Hardy persona you will resemble is Bane, the Batman antagonist from 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises.

“We have created the world’s first voice mask for smartphones, called Hushme,” CEO Roman Sakun told Digital Trends. “Hushme is a Bluetooth hands-free device, with the additional features of voice masking. You connect it to your mobile and can listen to a music or use as a traditional hands-free, but if you are in open space office and need to make a private call, you just put it on and speak. Due to insulating materials, your voice is decreased by 60 percent in ‘passive’ mode, and [people at a distance of three feet cannot] understand what are you speaking about. If you are in a crowded noisy place like a railway station or airport, then you can use ‘active’ mode and get almost 100 percent privacy.”

In this ‘active’ mode, the Hushme employs the same voice-dampening insulating technology, but also utilizes speakers on the outside of the device to generate masking sounds. In place of hearing you read out your credit card details or reveal top secret business plans, eavesdroppers will be treated to sounds like wind, ocean, or falling stones, all of which will be cleverly mixed with your voice. People receiving the phone calls will reportedly hear your voice as normal.

It’s certainly an innovative concept, and despite its attention-grabbing look, Sakun says there is plenty of demand for the product.

“It’s a little bit of an unusual thing, but very useful — and that’s really what people need in offices or on the go, when you need privacy,” he continued. Possible use-cases include everything from gamers who want to use voice chat at night without disturbing friends or family to the aforementioned business person on the move.

If you want to get hold of a Hushme unit, you can currently place a pre-order on Kickstarter, where units cost $189. Shipping is set for December.

Toshiba storage products based on ‘3D’ Flash memory put through paces

Why it matters to you

Always looking for more storage? Toshiba’s latest Flash storage technology is capable of cramming 64GB of data on a single chip.

While Microsoft flashed new technologies and announcements during its Build 2017 developer conference in Seattle, Dell had a conference of its own this week in Las Vegas — Dell EMC World 2017. It was during this event that Toshiba demonstrated its latest Flash storage technology, which is capable of cramming 64GB of data on a single chip.

More specifically, Toshiba demonstrated its third-generation BiCS Flash memory technology made up of 64 layers. As a reference, traditional “2D” Flash NAND memory used in SSDs, USB drives, and the like increase storage capacity by expanding cells horizontally like a city block. Eventually, the capacity of a storage device is bound by physical limits.

Toshiba’s “3D” Flash-based memory builds vertically, like a skyscraper, providing 64 “floors” of office-like storage cells. In turn, each cell can store three bits of data, thus a single chip can hold 512 gigabits (Gb) of information, which translates into 64 gigabytes (GB). Throw multiple chips into an SSD, and that drive has a crazy-high storage capacity.

“The future of SSDs is 3D,” said Greg Wong, founder and principal analyst of Forward Insights. “3D flash memory is enabling the production of higher-capacity and more cost-effective SSDs to better meet a variety of requirements across the consumer and enterprise spaces.”

Stacked flash memory isn’t anything new, but it’s becoming more mainstream. Flash-based memory makers typically slap special names on their 3D NAND technology, such as Intel’s 3D XPoint brand, Samsung’s V-NAND brand, and Toshiba’s BiCS brand, which is short for Bit Cost Scaling.

Ultimately, all three achieve the same purpose of scaling storage capacity vertically while using slightly different techniques. Toshiba promises high speed due to the way data is shoved into each storage cell. It also promises high reliability based on how each cell is spread apart to prevent interference from neighboring cells.

Another benefit of BiCS is power reduction. Because the storage cells support an extremely fast “single-shot” programming sequence, the overall storage chip consumes less power. Standard hard drives also consume more power because they include spinning magnetic storage discs and disc readers to read and write data. Flash storage has no moving parts.

The 64-layer BiCS Flash chip demonstrated during Dell’s convention resided in a new Toshiba XG Series SSD. This was the drive’s first public showing, and will serve as a launch pad for Toshiba’s third-generation BiCS Flash technology.  The drive connected to its host laptop via an internal NVMe PCI Express interface packing around 1TB of storage using 64GB and 32GB chips.

“The new XG Series SSD is an ideal platform to launch the 64-layer flash memory, due to the product’s broad adoption, maturity, and robustness, honed over multiple generations of PCIe/NVMe client SSD product releases,” the company said.

Toshiba plans to move all client, data center, and enterprise SSD to the new 64-layer BiCS Flash memory once the XG Series SSDs hit the market. For now, Toshiba is sampling the 64GB BiCS Flash chip to original equipment manufacturers.

Some HP PCs are logging keystrokes by accident; a fix is on its way

Why it matters to you

Your HP PC might be recording what you are typing, but a fix is on the way.

Privacy and security are hot topics lately given the amount of malware that is constantly circulating throughout the internet by criminals and even government agencies with the purpose of accessing our personal and business information. At the same time, information is sometimes gathered inadvertently that could nevertheless end up making its way to nefarious parties.

In many cases, issues arise where a function that is meant to make things easier for users ends up being poorly executed. One example of exactly that phenomena seems to have created by an audio driver that has shipped in a number of HP PCs, Techspot reports.

Security firm Modzero discovered code in a Conexant audio driver that supports an HP feature that enables controlling audio hardware by using keyboard combinations that toggle features on and off. One example would be a hotkey for enabling and disabling the microphone.

This driver apparently intercepts and saves keyboard input in order to control the functionality. While it is meant to only grab onto the required key presses, it seems to grab all the key inputs and saves them to a file. Worse yet, the file is not encrypted, meaning it would be easy to access by malware in real time or after the fact.

modzero

Although the problem is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the file is overwritten after each start, the researchers note that it could exist in backup files and could thus be recovered well after the fact. You can check if your HP PC is affected by looking for the programs “C:WindowsSystem32MicTray64.exe” or “C:WindowsSystem32MicTray.exe” exist and renaming them if they do. If a “C:UsersPublicMicTray.log” file exists, then that should be deleted.

We reached out to HP to get its take on the situation, and it provided the following response:

“HP is committed to the security of its customers and we are aware of an issue on select HP PCs. HP has no access to customer data as a result of this issue. We have identified a fix and will make it available to our customers.”

This is obviously a mistake on the part of the driver developers and, hopefully, HP will resolve the issue soon. We note that there is no evidence that any malware or other software has made use of the data that is collected by the driver and so there is no reason to panic at this point. Nevertheless, keep an eye out for an update from HP, which should then be implemented as soon as possible.