Galaxy S6 and S6 edge users on T-Mobile are finally getting Android 7.0

You can hold off on upgrading your aging Samsung device for a little bit longer.

The Galaxy S6 and S6 edge may no longer be the two most popular Samsung smartphones, but if you’re still holding on to one of the two and you’re on T-Mobile, you’re due for an update. Both devices are officially getting Android 7.0 Nougat, which includes interface tweaks, Android’s multi-window mode, and Doze capabilities. You’re still a few minor iterations behind the very latest version of Android, but at least the 2-year-old device has a few more months of relevance before you retire it.

Those of you holding on to the mega-size Galaxy Tab S2 purchased from T-Mobile will also see the Nougat update hit the tablet device. And note that if you’re holding onto a regular, non-contracted Tab S2, there might be an Android 7.0 update waiting for you.

Software updates are always good news, especially if the updates are for the near-latest version of Android on an aging device. For many, the update to Nougat could be enough to help spark a bit of new life in a device that’s still chugging along, even after a year and a half of constant usage. There’s no word on whether the old Galaxy S6 and S6 edges on T-Mobile will still receive their security updates, but at least this is enough of an update to tide you over until you can commit to another two years of monthly payments for a new device.

Those of you with other U.S. carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, who are still waiting on Nougat may have missed the update when it hit earlier this year.

Samsung Galaxy S6

• Galaxy S6 review
• Galaxy S6 complete specs
• Galaxy S6 news | GS6 edge news
• Galaxy S6 beginner’s guide
• Galaxy S6 forums | GS6 edge forums
• Shop for accessories

Amazon
Verizon
AT&T
Sprint
T-Mobile

Google Chrome’s latest update helps soup it up for more robust web apps

With every new update, Google appears to be readying Chrome for a future where few “real” apps exist.

If you’re an Android user, Google Chrome is probably your mobile browser of choice. And if it is, then this latest update might get you excited about a future where you don’t even have to worry about having an entire app installed to get to its best functionality. Many of Chrome 59’s new features seem to have been added with the goal of revving up the browser so that it’s both able to support and compatible with the purported future onslaught of web-based apps.

Android Police helped break down the various new pieces that make up Chrome 59. The update adds animated PNG support, which is actually a format utilized heavily by Apple’s iMessage; an image capture API, which gives websites more access to a device’s front- and rear-facing camera abilities, and improved security, like cutting off a known technique used by spammy websites that launch pop-ups on your mobile browser. Just say no to spam, kids.

Developers have access to a few new features within Chrome 59, too. They include the ability to implement the Installed Related Apps API, which refers to a very specific feature that essentially checks to see if you have an actual application installed, as well as a new “headless mode,” which hides the navigation bar and forces the webpage on display into fullscreen mode.

Many of Chrome 59’s new features clearly point to a future where instant and web-based mobile apps are the norm. Even the most minor feature additions, like the ability for a webpage to go full screen, seem to have been added in an effort to make webpages more dynamic by giving them more control over a device’s user interface — after all, full-size mobile apps already function in this manner. It makes sense if you consider Google’s investment in Instant Apps and progressive web apps.

If you’re curious about the new Chrome features, wait for the update to hit your mobile device this week. The update is coming to the Chrome desktop app, too.

Arms review: Nintendo’s new fighting game is well worth reaching for

When Nintendo finally unveiled the Switch at a showcase just prior to its launch, Arms was one of the games that left everyone convinced that the Japanese giant had recovered its mojo, and that the Switch – cue sighs of relief – wasn’t going to be another flop of Wii U proportions.

That’s because the motion-sensing boxing game was clearly imbued with the party-game spirit of the original Wii, as well as the ethos that has characterised Nintendo’s best franchises over the decades: easy to grasp, yet tough to master.

In the intervening months, Arms has acquired a considerable amount of polish: it looks superb, in a cartoonish, primary-coloured, in-your-face manner. Which is important, as it needs to be good to watch: it’s a fully formed e-sport out of the box, which will soon be vying with Overwatch to clutter up the Twitch airwaves.

Is it another exclusive Nintendo Switch must-buy?

Arms review: All about the controls

Another important aspect of Arms is that it is a truly original title, custom-built for the Switch – a luxury that the Wii U barely enjoyed during its ill-fated lifecycle. While it can make use of the Switch’s bewildering assortment of control-system possibilities – you can play it via a Classic Controller or on the base Switch with the Joy-Cons attached – it’s at its most enjoyable when each person playing it makes use of a Joy-Con in each hand. It’s also possible for two people to play against each other with one Joy-Con each, although in that case, as with the other controller configurations, you must use a joystick to move, which is a slightly less intuitive way of playing it.

If, instead, you grasp one Joy-Con in each hand, with the narrow sides facing the TV or Switch screen and the triggers and bumpers facing you, you don’t have to go near either of the joysticks or any of the face buttons. To move left, right, forwards or backwards, you merely lean both Joy-Cons in the appropriate direction. The left and right bumpers are crucial: the left one enables you dash in whatever direction you’re moving, while the right one enables you jump. To punch, you merely make punching motions with either hand. Tilting the Joy-Cons towards each other adopts a blocking stance, and punching with both hands allows you grab your opponent.

The final element of the control system is a flurry attack, which takes a while to power up as you punch, jump and dash. When you launch it by pressing either trigger, you can unleash a super-fast, devastatingly powerful sequence of attacks by punching frantically.

On paper, that control system may sound complicated, but in practice its’s the exact opposite: before very long at all, your character seems to move and attack almost by osmosis. Arms makes it easy enough to learn all the elements of the control system via the main Grand Prix mode, which is what passes for a single-player game (although it can be played by two people).

Nintendo

Grand Prix simply puts you through 10 bouts against computer-controlled opponents, allowing you, at the start, to set the difficulty level from 1 to 7. If you select 1, your opponents are pretty passive and easy to defeat. And as you crank up the difficulty level by degrees, it gives a fascinating insight into the game’s AI.

Arms review: Multiple modes

Even in Grand Prix mode, you come across the odd bout which isn’t just a straight fight to reduce your opponent’s health to zero. Arms contains a number of mini-games, too.

There’s V-Ball, which puts each player either side of a net playing volleyball with a spherical bomb: if it blows up on your opponent’s side, you win a point.

Nintendo

Hoops is all about pulling off grabs – whenever you do so, you dunk your opponent in a basketball hoop.

Skillshot tests your movement, as it puts each player either side of a slot from which targets pop up; you must punch them down before your opponent, and you can also punch your opponent to put them off.

1-on-100 is a survival mode, in which you must last as long as you can against a constant stream of AI-controlled adversaries.

Arms gives you two ways of getting online – Party Match is billed as just for fun, while Ranked Match lets you build up a reputation, when you feel you’re ready for that.

Nintendo

Versus mode, meanwhile, can accommodate up to four players on a single Switch, and lets you select any of the mini-games and tweak parameters, such as the number of rounds. The default – and the foundation of Arms’ aspirations to become an e-sport – pits you against someone else in three best-of-three-bouts rounds.

Arms review: Surprising depth and characters

Once you start playing Arms in earnest, you soon begin to discover surprising amounts of depth, along with the importance of taking a strategic approach.

The first decision to make regards which of ten characters to choose. The characters differ wildly, from slow-moving tanks that pack a major punch, like Mechanica, to nimble types like Ninjara, who has a mini-teleport evasion move. Some of the characters have hilarious quirks, like the jelly-like Helix, who can evade incoming attacks by sinking into the ground.

Nintendo

If you embark on a Grand Prix, you’re forced to stick with a single character. It’s worthwhile, though, as you earn in-game currency which can be used to purchase new arms.

Another layer of strategy centres on the arms you pick. Some are straight boxing gloves, but others operate more like boomerangs or rockets – the latter tend to move slowly, so they are easy to evade, but cause a lot of damage when they connect. Each arm gives you three choices, and you can change at the end of each bout – for example, if you are taking on an opponent who launches fast, straight attacks, it comes in handy to have an arm that can get to them around their sides, or a mallet that can go in over the top of their attacks.

The arenas play a part in strategy, too. Some, for example, contain trampoline-like areas which can help you get elevation and evade incoming attacks if you have a ponderous character but can get your timing right. Others have destructible pillars that you can hide behind, and one is a flight of steps, on which being at the top definitely gives you an advantage.

Nintendo

So once you get to grips with Arms’ subtleties, its bouts become fascinatingly tactical, as you manoeuvre yourself into the perfect position to cause the most damage. Grabs inflict a lot of damage, but if your opponent evades them, you recover from them slowly, which renders you vulnerable. Finding the right arms to take on each character requires a bit of thought, as does choosing the right character in the first place.

Arms review: The weak point

To criticise, we have to highlight the fact that Arms’ Grand Prix mode doesn’t have anything resembling a story – the only way in which it varies is by letting you choose the difficulty level and character. But it’s worth playing through it with each of the characters, in order to work out which ones work best for you, and to acquire new arms for them.

Verdict

Despite its surface simplicity, Arms has every chance of becoming a popular e-sport. Like Overwatch, it gains depth and subtlety from the clever design of its characters and their arms, and two-player bouts are mesmerising to watch.

But it’s also the sort of game you could play against your granny at a family gathering, with that gleeful, ice-breaking party vibe that the original Wii had.

If you own a Nintendo Switch and like fighting games, you’d be mad to resist Arms’ charms. And if you’ve been holding off from buying the console due to a perceived lack of games that make imaginative use of its Joy-Con controllers, then Arms thoroughly puts paid to that argument.

Arms is available from 16 June, exclusively for Nintendo Switch, priced £45

Apple made a pair of sneakers once and now you can buy them

How much would you pay for a pair of really old sneakers – better yet, Apple-branded sneakers?

Private collectibles vendor Heritage Auctions has published a new auction listing, and the starting price isn’t exactly cheap. It plans to auction off a pair of rare, vintage Apple trainers, with the bidding set to open at just $15,000. The shoe, which features a rainbow Apple logo, was originally produced in the early 1990s for company employees. The auction is scheduled to go live on eBay on 11 June.

Apple was experimenting with fashion apparel and wearables at the time, which you can read all about here, but for whatever reason, these shoe never left the prototype stage and were given to employees. It’s unclear how many pairs exist, but some reports speculate only one or two may be out in the wild. Heritage Auctions estimated the real value of the shoes to be somewhere around $30,000.

There aren’t even many photographs of the sneakers since they’re so rare, so we imagine Apple fan boys and girls will be chomping at the bits to get their hands on – or should we say, feet in – these kicks. It’ll be interesting to see how much they go for, considering Apple memorabilia tends to fetch extreme prices at auctions. Last year, for instance, Steve Jobs’ leather jacket sold for $22,000.

TheMarin School in California even sold couple of authentic Steve Jobs business cards for $10,000.

Twitch gives up-and-coming-streamers a cut of game sales

There’s an additional avenue for non-Partnered Twitch streamers to make money. Now, in addition to earning money via Bits, Affiliate streamers can earn a five percent revenue share when viewers buy the game they’re streaming, directly from their channel. “All Affiliates are automatically enabled to start earning from game sales starting today,” according to a press release. “They only need to be playing a game that is available for sale on Twitch for a purchase button to appear on their channel page.”

With this, Twitch is further ensuring that it can attract new streamers and then, importantly, keep them around by providing ways for them to earn money. Five percent of a $5 sale is only $0.25 though and the same percentage of a $60 game is only $3, so it’s going to take an awful lot of game sales and Bits to make rent.

Astronomers prove Einstein right: Stars can warp light

In a new study published today in Science, researchers achieved a rare event — simultaneously proving Albert Einstein both right and wrong. The scientists were able to confirm one of Einstein’s theories, something even he wasn’t sure would be possible.

The study centers around an effect called gravitational microlensing. And the idea is that supermassive objects, such as stars, can bend light that passes by them. The object’s gravity actually works as a sort of lens, warping the direction of the passing light. Einstein predicted this in his theory of general relativity, but because observing that effect requires a very specific set of parameters to line up perfectly, he thought we’d never be able to observe it directly.

But pessimism got the better of Einstein here and because our technology is way better than what it was during his time, these microlensing effects are now detectable.

Researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope watched a white dwarf star — the leftover core of a star nearing the end of its life — pass in front of another distant star. When it did, the white dwarf appeared to push the other star out of its way. It didn’t actually do that, though. The white dwarf’s gravity just warped the light of the background star, making it look like the light jumped out of the way. It’s the first time this effect has been seen from stars other than the Sun.

In addition to just being really cool, this new technique also allows astronomers to measure the mass of the star doing the warping. The intensity of the light-deflection can help scientists determine the object’s mass and gravity. In the study, they were able to get the mass of the white dwarf based on this effect, which they hadn’t been able to successfully do before.

Watch the video below for more information on the study and what the findings mean for future research.

Source: Science

Airbnb makes good on its promise to house the displaced

Airbnb said it would help hosts take in refugees and evacuees as a response to President Trump’s attempted immigration ban, and it’s following through on that promise. The home rental service has launched a promised website that lets you volunteer to host people who need temporary housing, focusing on refugees and those displaced by natural disasters. As before, it’s also accepting suggestions for other groups that could benefit from the offer.

The goal remains lofty: Airbnb wants to house 100,000 people in the space of 5 years. That’s no mean feat, but the company has at least some experience in arranging these selfless gestures. It already encourages hosts to take in people affected by terrorist attacks and other incidents — in a sense, this is the next logical step. There’s no guarantee that this initiative will meet its targets, but it could serve as an important complement to official housing efforts if it catches on.

Source: Airbnb Blog

How Apple reinvigorated its AI aspirations in under a year

At its WWDC 2017 keynote on Monday, Apple showed off the fruits of its AI research labors. We saw a Siri assistant that’s smart enough to interpret your intentions, an updated Metal 2 graphics suite designed for machine learning and a Photos app that can do everything its Google rival does without an internet connection. Being at the front of the AI pack is a new position for Apple to find itself in. Despite setting off the AI arms race when it introduced Siri in 2010, Apple has long lagged behind its competitors in this field. It’s amazing what a year of intense R&D can do.

Well, technically, it’s been three years of R&D, but Apple had a bit of trouble getting out of its own way for the first two. See, back in 2010, when Apple released the first version of Siri, the tech world promptly lost its mind. “Siri is as revolutionary as the Mac,” the Harvard Business Review crowed, though CNN found that many people feared the company had unwittingly invented Skynet v1.0. But for as revolutionary as Siri appeared to be at first, its luster quickly wore off once the general public got ahold of it and recognized the system’s numerous shortcomings.

Fast forward to 2014. Apple is at the end of its rope with Siri’s listening and comprehension issues. The company realizes that minor tweaks to Siri’s processes can’t fix its underlying problems and a full reboot is required. So that’s exactly what they did. The original Siri relied on hidden Markov models — a statistical tool used to model time series data (essentially reconstructing the sequence of states in a system based only on the output data) — to recognize temporal patterns in handwriting and speech recognition.

The company replaced and supplemented these models with a variety of machine learning techniques including Deep Neural Networks and “long short-term memory networks” (LSTMNs). These neural networks are effectively more generalized versions of the Markov model. However, because they posses memory and can track context — as opposed to simply learning patterns as Markov models do — they’re better equipped to understand nuances like grammar and punctuation to return a result closer to what the user really intended.

The new system quickly spread beyond Siri. As Steven Levy points out, “You see it when the phone identifies a caller who isn’t in your contact list (but who did email you recently). Or when you swipe on your screen to get a shortlist of the apps that you are most likely to open next. Or when you get a reminder of an appointment that you never got around to putting into your calendar.”

By the WWDC 2016 keynote, Apple had made some solid advancements in its AI research. “We can tell the difference between the Orioles who are playing in the playoffs and the children who are playing in the park, automatically,” Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi told the assembled crowd.

The company also released during WWDC 2016 its neural network API running Basic Neural Network Subroutines, an array of functions enabling third party developers to construct neural networks for use on devices across the Apple ecosystem.

However, Apple had yet to catch up with the likes of Google and Amazon, both of whom had either already released an AI-powered smart home companion (looking at you, Alexa) or were just about to (Home would be released that November). This is due in part to the fact that Apple faced severe difficulties recruiting and retaining top AI engineering talent because it steadfastly refused to allow its researchers to publish their findings. That’s not so surprising coming from a company so famous for its tight-lipped R&D efforts that it once sued a news outlet because a drunk engineer left a prototype phone in a Palo Alto bar.

“Apple is off the scale in terms of secrecy,” Richard Zemel, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Toronto, told Bloomberg in 2015. “They’re completely out of the loop.” The level of secrecy was so severe that new hires to the AI teams were reportedly directed not to announce their new positions on social media.

“There’s no way they can just observe and not be part of the community and take advantage of what is going on,” Yoshua Bengio, a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, told Bloomberg. “I believe if they don’t change their attitude, they will stay behind.”

Luckily for Apple, those attitudes did change and quickly. After buying Seattle-based machine learning AI startup Turi for around $200 million in August 2016, Apple hired AI expert Russ Salakhutdinov away from Carnegie Mellon University that October. It was his influence that finally pushed Apple’s AI out of the shadows and into the light of peer review.

In December 2016, while speaking at the the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Barcelona, Salakhutdinov stunned his audience when he announced that Apple would begin publishing its work, going so far as to display an overhead slide reading, “Can we publish? Yes. Do we engage with academia? Yes.”

Later that month Apple made good on Salakhutdinov’s promise, publishing “Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training”. The paper looked at the shortcomings of using simulated objects to train machine vision systems. It showed that while simulated images are easier to teach than photographs, the results don’t work particularly well in the real world. Apple’s solution employed a deep-learning system, known as known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), that pitted a pair of neural networks against one another in a race to generate images close enough to photo-realistic to fool a third “discriminator” network. This way, researchers can exploit the ease of training networks using simulated images without the drop in performance once those systems are out of the lab.

In January 2017, Apple further signaled its seriousness by joining Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft in the Partnership on AI. This industry group seeks to establish ethical, transparency and privacy guidelines in the field of AI research while promoting research and cooperation between its members. The following month, Apple drastically expanded its Seattle AI offices, renting a full two floors at Two Union Square and hiring more staff.

“We’re trying to find the best people who are excited about AI and machine learning — excited about research and thinking long term but also bringing those ideas into products that impact and delight our customers,” Apple’s director of machine learning Carlos Guestrin told GeekWire.

By March 2017, Apple had hit its stride. Speaking at the EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco, Salakhutdinov laid out the state of AI research, discussing topics ranging from using “attention mechanisms” to better describe the content of photographs to combining curated knowledge sources like Freebase and WordNet with deep-learning algorithms to make AI smarter and more efficient. “How can we incorporate all that prior knowledge into deep-learning?” Salakhutdinov said. “That’s a big challenge.”

That challenge could soon be a bit easier once Apple finishes developing the Neural Engine chip that it announced this May. Unlike Google devices, which shunt the heavy computational lifting required by AI processes up to the cloud where it is processed on the company’s Tensor Processing Units, Apple devices have traditionally split that load between the onboard CPU and GPU.

This Neural Engine will instead handle AI processes as a dedicated standalone component, freeing up valuable processing power for the other two chips. This would not only save battery life by diverting load from the power-hungry GPU, it would also boost the device’s onboard AR capabilities and help further advance Siri’s intelligence — potentially exceeding the capabilities of Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.

But even without the added power that a dedicated AI chip can provide, Apple’s recent advancements in the field have been impressive to say the least. In the span between two WWDCs, the company managed to release a neural network API, drastically expand its research efforts, poach one of the country’s top minds in AI from one of the nation’s foremost universities, reverse two years of backwards policy, join the industry’s working group as a charter member and finally — finally — deliver a Siri assistant that’s smarter than a box of rocks. Next year’s WWDC is sure to be even more wild.

Image: AFP/Getty (Federighi on stage / network of photos)

Minecraft: Story Mode’ season two arrives for summer vacation

If you loved Minecraft’s first Story Mode, there’s more on the way: A second season of Story Mode is coming this summer. The first episode, called “Hero in Residence,” will be on sale July 11th.

The first season of Minecraft: Story Mode consisted of eight episodes, which were released over the course of 2015 and 2016. Players took control of a character named Jesse and went on a quest with a band of allies in tow. Jesse is customizable; Patton Oswalt and Catherine Taber served as the male and female voices, respectively. Both actors are set to return for the second season, which features the same characters.

In the first season, the choices players made over the course of the game determined how the story progressed. Those decisions will be taken into account for the second season, though it’s friendly to new Minecraft players as well. It appears that style of gameplay will continue through the new episodes, with the choices players make influencing the game’s outcome.

It’s worth noting that, while the first season of Minecraft: Story Mode is available on just about every platform you can think of, including consoles, the Apple TV and iOS and Android devices, it appears as this may not be the case for the second season. The release only specifically mentions Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices. It’s not clear why some platforms are unsupported (especially considering Minecraft just launched on the Nintendo Switch in mid-May), but hopefully additional systems will be added closer to launch.

Source: Minecraft

US intelligence wants to make a key foreign surveillance law permanent

The directors of America’s federal intelligence agencies appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday in an effort to convince the governing body to permanently extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that enables the federal government to monitor the communications of non-US citizens on foreign soil who are communicating with Americans here in the United States regarding matters of national security. Essentially, it enabled the intelligence community to eavesdrop on conversations between suspected terrorists and their associates, even if some of them happen to be US citizens.

Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday to vouch for Section 702, which is set to expire at the end of the year. The directors argued that Section 702 should be made permanent in order to continue protecting American interests and national security.

“We cannot allow adversaries abroad to cloak themselves in the legal protections we extend to Americans,” White House Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece.

However, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011 ruled that the NSA’s digital dragnet violated the 4th Amendment because it was so broad as to collect the information of US citizens who were completely unrelated to the government’s investigation. Even after the agency enacted additional safeguards to protect citizens privacy, its searches continued to pick up random citizens, instigating the FISC to withhold the program’s renewal until it eliminated it’s dragnet searches entirely.

What’s more, the provision has repeatedly drawn the ire of civil rights and privacy advocates, as well as tech titans like Google and Facebook. “This development underscores the need for Congress to significantly reform Section 702 of FISA, which will continue to allow warrantless surveillance of Americans,” ACLU legislative counsel Neema Singh Guliani told Engadget in April. “While the NSA’s policy change will curb some of the most egregious abuses under the statute, it is at best a partial fix. Congress should take steps to ensure such practices are never resurrected and end policies that permit broad, warrantless surveillance under Section 702, which is up for reauthorization at the end of the year.”

On the other hand, the push for Section 702’s permanence has (unsurprisingly) attracted the support of a large bloc of conservative Senators. And given the current polarization within Congress you can expect some legislative fireworks before this matter is settled.

Source: Reuters