Pakistan investigates army critics on social media

Pakistani authorities are on a mission to squash all anti-military sentiments online. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan directed the country’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to investigate 200 social media accounts with posts that criticize the country’s powerful Armed Forces. FIA told Reuters that it has already identified the owners behind 18 of the accounts, all of whom are accused of spreading negative material against the army. “Unwarranted criticism of security forces and other institutions responsible for the defence of the realm is not allowed,” Nisar said in a statement.

Pakistan’s military is the largest among all Muslim countries and has played a central role in shaping the nation since it was formed in 1947. It’s truly a force to be reckoned with, and now that it has decided to enforce the country’s new cybercrime law, it could very well be able to silence all its critics. Pakistan’s parliament passed the Prevention of Electronic Crime Act in August last year despite opposition from people who believe it could limit freedom of expression in what is currently a democratic nation.

Clearly, those activists’ fears were warranted. Reuters says that at least two out of the 18 social media users the FIA identified have already been interrogated, charged and released. According to Al Jazeera, though, the agency detained more than 18 people: it reportedly took in 23 Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party supporters for questioning, threatening to charge them under the new law. A PTI spokesperson said one of its supporters was even abducted from a province and brought to the capital in an armored car.

The agency isn’t just investigating activists either. One of its officials reportedly tried to intimidate France24 correspondent Taha Siddiqui into coming in and explaining his social media posts. Siddiqui said he wasn’t trying to spread negative info about the Pakistani military at all and filed a complaint in court citing harassment. PTI, which calls the crackdown a violation of fundamental human rights, has plans to push back against the crackdown, as well. It’s now preparing to sue the government for intimidation and harassment in the Islamabad High Court.

Source: Reuters

Nokia and Apple end their patent fight and become health allies

Over recent months, Apple has been embroiled lawsuits related to patent licensing. While its fight with Qualcomm continues to rumble on, the company confirmed today that it’s resolved one of its major disputes by signing a multi-year agreement with Nokia to utilize its intellectual property.

At the end of last year, Nokia sued Apple for declining to license patents related to technologies used in devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Apple had an agreement for some Nokia technologies, but had withheld offers on 32 other patents that covered everything from the display and UI to chipsets and video encoding.

Under the new agreement, Nokia will provide “network infrastructure products and services” to Apple. Apple, on the other hand, will resume stocking Nokia products — those formerly belonging to the Withings brand — in its retail and online stores. There’s even talk of both companies working together on future “digital health initiatives.”

“This is a meaningful agreement between Nokia and Apple,” said Maria Varsellona, Chief Legal Officer at Nokia. “It moves our relationship with Apple from being adversaries in court to business partners working for the benefit of our customers.”

Source: Nokia

Google’s AlphaGo AI defeats the world’s best human Go player

Google’s AI star, AlphaGo, wins again. It bested Ke Jie, the world’s best Go player, by just half a point — the closest margin possible. After the match, Google’s DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis explained that this was how AlphaGo was programmed: to maximise its winning chances, rather than the winning margin. This latest iteration of the AI player, nicknamed Master, apparently uses 10 times less computational power than its predecessor that beat Lee Sedol, working from a single PC connected to Google’s cloud server.

We’ve embedded the entire match here, but for those not completely up to speed with Go, the AI player picked up a 10-15 point lead early on, which limited the possibilities for Jie to respond. Jie was occasionally winning during the flow of the match, but AlphaGo would soon reclaim the lead, ensuring that his human opponent had limited options to win as the game progressed.

According to his human opponent, AlphaGo made many elegant moves: Jie pointed out the AI’s 24th move as a particularly high-level strategy that apparently made “all the stones work across the board.” Intriguingly, the Go prodigy even pitted some of AlphaGo’s own moves and strategies early into the match.

After the game, the DeepMind team explained that AlphaGo was programmed with a goal to win, but other versions of the AI could be made with different goals in mind, including “maximising the gap” — an aim of trouncing its opponent with a high-score win. Hassabis said: “We want to use AlphaGo as a tool that the Go community can use to improve their games.”

“We’ll release some details of the architecture, of the games that AlphaGo plays against itself, later this week,” said the DeepMind CEO. “The reason, ultimately, is to use [AI] more widely in science and medicine to help human experts make faster breakthroughs. We have a lot of work ahead of us in the coming years.”

The second match takes place on Thursday, with the final third match scheduled for Saturday. Because a computer doesn’t get tired, AlphaGo ‘Master’ will also take part in two other showcases. In one match, it’ll act as a teammate to two Chinese pros playing each other. In another, it’ll challenge five pro players at once. (Which is just showing off, surely.)

Apple and Nokia Settle Patent Dispute With New Licensing Agreement

Nokia and Apple announced today that they have settled all litigation related to their intellectual property dispute and agreed a multi-year patent license.

Under the collaborative agreement, Nokia said it will provide “certain network infrastructure products and services” to Apple. In turn, Apple agreed to return all health products owned by the Finnish company to Apple retail and online stores.

“This is a meaningful agreement between Nokia and Apple,” said Maria Varsellona, Chief Legal Officer at Nokia, responsible for Nokia’s patent licensing business. “It moves our relationship with Apple from being adversaries in court to business partners working for the benefit of our customers.”

In December of last year, Nokia filed multiple complaints against Apple in several countries, accusing the Cupertino company of infringing several of its patents. In response, Apple sued Nokia in an antitrust lawsuit against several patent assertion entities which it claimed were trying to collect excessive fees for Nokia patents. Apple had established FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) deals with Nokia, but by transferring patents to patent holding companies, additional royalties can be demanded.

Just days after the legal dispute flared up, Apple pulled all Withings-branded, Nokia-owned accessories from its online and retail stores around the world. Nokia stood its ground, however, claiming that it had not been able to reach a licensing agreement with Apple and therefore had to defend its rights.

Following the latest development, Nokia will receive an up-front cash payment from Apple with additional revenues forthcoming. The figure remains undisclosed, but net sales in Nokia patent licensing will reflect the value of the agreement, while Nokia expects related revenues to be reflected in the second quarter of 2017. No other details of the terms of the agreement have been released.

“We are pleased with this resolution of our dispute and we look forward to expanding our business relationship with Nokia,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer.

Tags: Withings, Nokia, Patent lawsuits
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Apple HomeKit Support Coming for IKEA’s Trådfri Affordable Smart Lighting System

Swedish home store IKEA has announced that its recently announced Trådfri smart lighting system will soon be compatible with HomeKit, Apple’s smart home management platform.

The affordable range of home lighting products was originally announced in late March and includes LED bulbs, illuminated panels, a motion sensor kit, a gateway kit, and dimming lights, but no mention was made about whether the collection would be able to integrate with existing smart home solutions like HomeKit.

However, IKEA says HomeKit support is in the works, enabling users to control the devices using the Apple Home app on iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch, or voice using Siri.

We believe that smart home technology should be accessible to everyone. For this reason, we will continue to work with our products to be compatible with other products available on the market.

According to iphone-ticker.de, which first spotted the announcement, IKEA plans to retrofit the new functions in the summer, via a software update to the Trådfri Gateway and Trådfri app. In addition to HomeKit, the update will also make IKEA’s smart products controllable through Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Tags: HomeKit, Ikea
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Valve hired the team behind ‘Kerbal Space Program’

Worried that Valve’s recent departures mark an end to conventional game development at the Half-Life studio? You might have a glimmer of hope. Valve has confirmed that it hired the team at Squad, better known as the creators of the shipbuilding hit Kerbal Space Program. The company isn’t saying just how many people it hired, what they’re working on or what’s happening to KSP (“more details soon,” a spokesperson says), but former Valve designer Roger Lundeen had said in the Game Dev Unchained podcast that the “entire team” had made the leap.

The hire happened 4 to 6 months ago, Lundeen says.

There are a number of possibilities for the Squad team. It could signal a deeper commitment to game development, whether it’s for the VR titles already in the works or something else entirely (don’t get your hopes up for Half-Life 3, folks). Alternately, their gaming chops might be secondary. They could help create VR apps and experiences, for starters.

Whatever the reasons, the hires represent some bittersweet news. Squad is considered one of the darlings of Steam’s early access program, having built up enough buzz around unfinished versions of KSP that its official launch was really just a formality — it had fans who’d played for years. Valve’s move rewards a team that had poured its heart into one of the most ambitious indie games of recent memory, but it also casts doubt on the future of KSP or any other games that might have been in the pipeline. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next, even if it’s not what gamers were expecting.

Source: Eurogamer, SoundCloud

‘Gray Pubic’ is proof even AI can’t get paint names right

When the robots take over your job, remember this: you can try naming paints for a living. Research scientist and neural network enthusiast Janelle Shane experimented with the idea of using AI to name new paints. After all, we keep coming up with new shades, and professional paint naming doesn’t exactly sound lucrative. As Shane learned, though, it’s not easy training a neural network to conjure up names that are both creative and appropriate.

To teach the neural network how to create new shade-and-name combinations, the research scientist fed it 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. Its first iteration created a bunch of dull, nearly identical shades — cranking up the creativity setting boosted the colors’ variety, but it paired them up with a bunch of gibberish, such as “Bylfgoam” and “Dondarf.”

The final iteration was much better and can recognize some colors, including white, red and grey. Like the neural network Shane trained to churn out pick-up lines, it’s still no Shakespeare, but it did come up with some amusing, slightly risqué names like “Gray Pubic,” “Bank Butt,” “Sindis Poop,” “Stanky Bean” and “Turdly.”

That said, even if you can think of something better than “Stoner Blue” and “Stoomy Brown,” you may still want to think of an alternative career for a world after the robot apocalypse. Shane admits that it could’ve been done better using different parameters, something another individual or a tech titan working on AI like IBM could do in the future.

Via: Ars Technica

Source: Postcards from the Frontier of Science

iPhone SE Tops Customer Satisfaction Survey Despite Shift Towards Larger Screens

Despite a shift towards smartphones with larger screens, the iPhone SE has topped all other smartphones in the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Apple’s four-inch smartphone received a customer satisfaction score of 87 out of 100 to finish just ahead of Samsung’s 5.7-inch Galaxy S6 edge+ and the 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus.

20 other smartphones, mostly including other iPhone and Galaxy models, received customer satisfaction scores of between 70 and 85, according to the ACSI results published today.

“Over the past few years, the general trend for smartphones has been toward larger screens,” says ACSI Managing Director David VanAmburg. “But apparently, consumers were craving a new iteration of a smaller, less expensive phone as the iPhone SE – Apple’s first update to a 4-inch phone since 2013 – comes in first in ACSI this year.”

ACSI said the results are based on interviews with 36,194 customers in the United States, chosen at random and contacted via email between May 2016 and April 2017. The survey data was inputted into ACSI’s so-called “cause-and-effect econometric model,” which in turn estimates customer satisfaction.

Apple introduced the iPhone SE in March 2016, acknowledging that some people simply love smaller phones, as evidenced by the 30 million 4-inch iPhones that it sold in 2015. The smartphone is essentially an iPhone 5s with newer tech specs, including a twice as fast A9 chip and a 12-megapixel rear camera.

Given its lower $399 starting price, the iPhone SE is also a popular smartphone in more price-sensitive markets such as India.

Apple has yet to release a second-generation iPhone SE, but it doubled the smartphone’s previous 16GB and 64GB storage capacities to 32GB and 128GB a few months ago, without raising prices. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said Apple is unlikely to refresh the iPhone SE in the first half of 2017.

Related Roundup: iPhone SE
Tag: ACSI
Buyer’s Guide: iPhone SE (Caution)
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A speed benefit in solid-state disk design opens them up for attack

Why it matters to you

Your SSDs might be fast, but they’re also designed in a way that opens you up to yet another kind of attack.

Solid-state disks (SSDs) offer some serious benefits over their older hard-disk drive (HDD) siblings. SSDs are faster by orders of magnitude than HDDs, and they’re fundamentally more reliable — particularly for mobile devices where moving parts can be affected by movement and drops.

As SSD pricing has dropped from being significantly more expensive than HDDs to only a little more expensive, the price-to-performance ratio has improved to where SSDs have become by far the preferred storage device. However, some new information suggests that SSDs aren’t perfect and bring a unique vulnerability to particular kinds of attacks, as ExtremeTech reports.

The details are complex and require digging into the details of how SSDs are designed and how they work. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University were the first to uncover the flaw, and their findings are covered in copious technical detail in a recently published paper.

In simpler terms, the vulnerability affects particular kinds of SSDs that are based on multilevel cell (MLC) technology, which make up the majority of those currently being sold and developed. The vulnerability in question does not affect older single-level cell (SLC) devices. The most advanced 3D NAND flash used in some SSDs are not affected yet but could be affected in future designs.

The vulnerability leverages a design quality of MLC-based SSDs that actually confers some benefits, including lower latency and better performance. The problem stems from the fact that data is written into a buffer directly from the individual flash cell that’s going to be written and not from the SSD’s flash controller.

Again, it’s all very technical, but basically, data can be corrupted by an attacker introducing interference and introducing errors during the programming process. That can result in corrupted data and actual damage to an SSD.

The solution would be to buffer data into the SSD flash controller and allow the controller to correct errors. The problem with this response is that it would also increase latency by around 5 percent and thus reduce performance — something that manufacturers might not be quick to do in the consumer market in particular given the important of raw speed to selling SSDs.

In any event, there’s something else to worry about to go along with the waves of malware and ransomware attacks we’ve seen lately. Our SSDs aren’t as safe as we thought they were, and that’s all we needed.

What’s on TV: ‘War Machine,’ ‘Get Out,’ and ‘Beat Shazam’

This week Netflix premieres its Brad Pitt movie War Machine, as well as the third season of Bloodline. Meanwhile, Archer wraps up its Dreamland season on FXX, while Jordan Peele’s Get Out comes home on Blu-ray. The NBA and NHL are closing out their conference final rounds this week, and gamers can check out a new Switch edition of Ultra Street Fighter II. Finally, Fox is premiering its Beat Shazam show, where players will have their ability to identify songs tested against the app. Look after the break to check out each day’s highlights, including trailers and let us know what you think (or what we missed).

Blu-ray & Games & Streaming

• Get Out
• Logan (4K)
• The Great Wall (4K)
• Vixen: The Movie
• Dheepan (Criterion)
• The Void
• D2: The Mighty Ducks
• D3: The Mighty Ducks
• Shadow Warrior 2 (PS4, Xbox One)
• Endless Space 2 (PC)
• Chroma Squad (PS4)
• Portal Knights (Xbox One, PS4)
• StarCrawlers (PC)
• Puzzle Showdown 4K (PS4, PC)
• Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (PS4)
• MXGP3 (PS4, Xbox One)
• Deliriant (PS4)
• Darksiders: Warmastered Edition (Wii U)
• Vanquish (PC)
• Ultra Street Fighter II (Switch)
• Embers of Mirrim (Xbox One, PS4)
• Everspace 1.0 (PC, Xbox One)
• Spellspire (Xbox One)
• Rime (PS4, PC, Xbox One)
• Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2 (PS4, PS3)

Monday

• Lucifer, Fox, 9PM
• NBA WCF: Spurs/Warriors, ESPN, 9PM
• Jane the Virgin (season finale), CW, 9PM
• The Twins, Freeform, 9PM
• Mommy Dead and Dearest, HBO, 10PM
• The Wall, NBC, 10PM
• Better Call Saul, AMC, 10PM
• The Late Late Show Carpool Karaoke Primetime Special, CBS, 10PM
• American Dad, TBS, 10PM
• The Therapist, Viceland, 11PM
• Angie Tribeca, TBS, 10:30PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11PM

Tuesday

• Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King, Netflix, 3AM
• Casual (season premiere), Hulu, 3AM
• Victorian Slum, PBS, 8PM
• Great News (season finale), NBC, 8PM
• Downward Dog, ABC, 8PM
• Pretty Little Liars, Freeform, 8PM
• The Flash (season finale), CW, 8PM
• The Manns, TV One, 8PM
• WWE Smackdown, USA, 8PM
• The Challenge: Reunion, MTV, 8PM
• Dancing with the Stars (season finale), ABC, 8:30PM
• NBA ECF Game 4: Celtics/Cavaliers, TNT, 8:30PM
• The Voice (season finale), NBC, 9PM
• The Challenge: Champs vs. Pros, MTV, 9PM
• Famous in Love, Freeform, 9PM
• Deadliest Catch, Discovery, 9PM
• iZombie, CW, 9PM
• Prison Break, Fox, 9PM
• Bull (season finale), CBS, 9PM
• Switched at Birth, Freeform, 9PM
• Face Off, Syfy, 9PM
• Outsiders, WGN, 9PM
• Imaginary Mary, ABC, 9:30PM
• Fargo, FX, 10PM
• Cooper’s Treasure, Discovery, 10PM
• Team Ninja Warrior, USA, 10PM
• The Americans, FX, 10PM
• Rebel, BET, 10PM
• Imposters, Bravo, 10PM
• Truth & Iliza, Freeform, 10PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11PM
• Problematic with Moshe Kasher (season finale), Comedy Central, 12AM
• The Dunk King (season finale), TNT, 12AM

Wednesday

• The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu, 3AM
• Dirty Dancing, ABC, 8PM
• Shots Fired (season finale), Fox, 8PM
• Catfish, MTV, 8PM
• Arrow (season finale), CW, 8PM
• Survivor (season finale), CBS, 8PM
• Are You the One: All Star Challenge, MTV, 9PM
• Empire (season finale), Fox, 9PM
• Law & Order: SVU (season finale), NBC, 9PM
• The 100 (season finale), CW, 9PM
• The Magicians, Syfy, 9PM
• Major Crimes, TNT, 9PM
• Archer (season finale), FXX, 10PM
• I Am Heath Ledger, Spike TV, 10PM
• The Expanse, Syfy, 10PM
• Nobodies, TV Land, 10PM
• The Quad, BET, 10PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11PM

Thursday

• Beat Shazam (series premiere), Fox, 8PM
• American Ninja Warrior: Celebrity Ninja Warrior, NBC, 8PM
• Love Connection (series premiere), Fox, 9PM
• Running Wild with Bear Grylls, NBC, 9PM
• The Amazing Race, CBS, 10PM
• Beerland, Viceland, 10PM
• Inside the FBI, USA, 10PM
• Dark Net (season finale), Showtime, 10PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11PM
• Impractical Jokers, TruTV, 11PM

Friday

• Bloodline (S3), Netflix, 3AM
• War Machine, Netflix, 3AM
• Long Strange Trip (S1), Amazon Prime, 3AM
• Dino Dana (S1), Amazon Prime, 3AM
• The Originals, CW, 8PM
• First Dates (season finale), NBC, 8PM
• Vice, HBO, 11PM
• Motherboard, Viceland, 11:30PM

Saturday

• Neon Joe: Werewolf Hunter (season finale), Cartoon Network, 12AM
• Doctor Who, BBC America, 9PM
• Class, BBC America, 10PM

Sunday

• Sunday Night Baseball, ESPN, 7:30PM
• NCIS: Los Angeles, CBS, 8PM
• White Princess, Starz, 8PM
• American Gods, Starz, 9PM
• The Leftovers, HBO, 9PM
• Twin Peaks, Showtime, 9PM
• Silicon Valley, HBO, 10PM
• United Shades of America, CNN, 10PM
• Veep, HBO, 10:30PM