Self-navigating cargo ships will use AI to plot their course

Japanese shipping companies want to build self-navigating cargo ships. Working alongside shipbuilders, their goal is to develop new technology that can predict malfunctions, reduce maritime accidents and improve efficiency.

The plan is to implement an AI-driven steering system that could lay out the shortest, safest and most fuel-efficient routes based on information about things like weather and any obstacles that might be in a ship’s way. Participating companies have agreed to share both expertise and costs, which are expected to top hundreds of millions of dollars, and they hope to construct around 250 ships with the new technology. Ultimately, the companies aim to implement completely unmanned shipping at some point in the future.

Japanese groups aren’t the only ones working to create autonomous cargo ships. Last year, Rolls-Royce announced plans to develop remote-controlled ships that it hopes to have ready in the very near future. While Natilus is going another route — designing massive drones that can fly cargo across oceans.

The developers hope to launch the Japanese smart ships by 2025, which is gearing up to be the year for self-navigating vehicles since Honda just announced that’s also its goal for perfecting autonomous cars.

Via: BBC

Source: Nikkei Asian Review

Cortana can be your frugal online shopping assistant

Microsoft’s Cortana could already help you with shopping thanks to image search and sales reminders. Now, it might help you get the most for your money too. In the latest Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft has rolled out a pilot feature in Microsoft Edge where Cortana can help you find the best price for a product you’re interested in buying. Right now, this feature supports 14 retailers, which includes Amazon, Walmart and eBay, as long as they’re within the US.

So, let’s say you’re on a product page for a vacuum cleaner on Walmart. Cortana can look up the price of that particular vacuum cleaner in competing stores (like Home Depot or Best Buy), while you still have that page open and it’ll let you know if the vacuum cleaner is available for a cheaper price elsewhere. Think of it as a Kayak for online shopping, but built right into the browser. It might not be as full-featured as Microsoft’s Personal Shopping Assistant (which lets you get notified of price changes), but at least Cortana doesn’t require installing a browser extension.

Source: Microsoft

Sony slashes prices on the year’s biggest games ahead of E3

If you can’t make it to LA this weekend and next week for the open-to-the-public E3, Sony still wants you to have a good time at home. In addition to a week of free access to multiplayer gaming sans a PlayStation Plus subscription (and a $10 discount on said subscription), Sony has slashed the prices on some of the biggest games from this year. Horizon Zero Dawn, MLB: The Show 17 and Nioh have all been marked down to $40, while The Last Guardian and Uncharted 4 from last year are now $20. The European PlayStation store is offering similar deals.

Looking to fill the gaps in your (digital) third-party library? Battlefield 1 and Mass Effect Andromeda temporarily cost $30, while Prey has been marked down to $40. More than that, if you spend $100 or more between now and June 20th, you’ll get a $15 credit. And here you were worried that your new, gold PlayStation 4 Slim’s 1TB hard drive would go unfilled.

Source: PlayStation Blog (1) (US), (2) (UK)

Palmer Luckey’s virtual border wall: From disruption to dystopia

“Disruption” was one of Silicon Valley’s worst buzzwords. But it was the battle cry of the greedy and desperate of coding and grifting. It meant better and faster data harvesting, venture capitalists throwing money at anything convenient to the wealthy. It meant companies skirting regulations, human rights, and labor laws were defensible heroes.

Every coder living off his girlfriend and unwilling to support himself with a job dreamed of having their startup called disruptive by any of the high holy thought leaders of the upper classes. It promised funding and a license to behave in any manner a man wanted. Call your users “dumb fucks,” ignore user safety and security, eschew laws to ruin life for poor people in cities, “innovate” a surveillance state that would make North Korea jealous, build a culture on sexual harassment or have a bang room in your office: All is permitted when you disrupt. Even if you want to disrupt like a despot, and create a startup to hunt and round up human beings, like disgraced Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey.

Disruption, like all Silicon Valley buzzwords, began to grow limp in its old age. To shore up the flagging jargon, just about every tech writer was calling every garbage startup “like Uber for (whatever).” Financial advisors, being noble Valley warriors, took to the Internet to try and bring “meaning” back to the buzzword, whatever that means.

But then Oculus Rift showed up and disruption was back, baby. Palmer Luckey’s plagued-with-problems virtual reality headset shored up 2014’s disruption dysfunction issues to be hailed as … Silicon Valley’s next disruption! The Kickstarter success practically printed money, raising $2.4 million (nearly 10 times its goal) from 9,522 backers — and Luckey earned a reputation of a man who attacks his supporters.

So it was no surprise to anyone when Luckey was revealed to be funneling piles of money and lots of energy into pro-Trump (and openly racist) online propaganda mill “Nimble America,” with his silent partner in the venture Milo Yiannopoulos, and its troll army.

Daily Beast, which broke the news, explained: “Nimble America was founded by two moderators of Reddit’s r/The_Donald, which helped popularize Trump-themed white supremacist and anti-Semitic memes along with 4Chan and 8Chan.” Among Palmer’s Nimble America foundational ideas are “America First” and “Legal Immigration.”

In tech lingo, Luckey’s side project was like a warm and fuzzy Y Combinator “startup school” for people who post content designed to harm others and scream “free speech”. Almost everything online related to Nimble America has been removed since the story broke.

Strangely, Luckey was ousted at the end of March from the “all lives matter” and “Holocaust denial is free speech” enclave of Facebook, which had acquired Oculus. Six weeks later, Chris Dycus, the first Oculus employee hired by Luckey, quit Facebook too. Dycus wrote on his employee Facebook page that he was leaving for a “job opportunity that I just can’t pass up” at a startup in Southern California “in stealth mode” that “really sounds like something I want to do.”

If you think that sounds disruptive, then you’re probably right. Dycus ran from Facebook’s fake-news-coddling bosom straight into the arms of Palmer Freeman Luckey. Their sekrit new startup got smacked out of stealth with an article last weekend describing how Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is now developing border surveillance technology. To create a “virtual wall” for the purpose of hunting and tracking human beings.

I guess you could say it’s “like Uber but for rounding people up.” Or maybe it’s like AirBnB but for dehumanizing refugees and immigrants. Maybe since Peter Thiel is reportedly planning to fund it, something more appropriate might be “like PayPal for the surveillance state” or “like Gawker but for genocide.” Maybe not buzzwordy enough? I don’t know.

The New York Times report explained that Luckey and Dycus’s awesome new startup is developing “surveillance technology that could be deployed on borders between countries and around military bases.” He told The Times, “We need a new kind of defense company, one that will save taxpayer dollars while creating superior technology to keep our troops and citizens safer.”

According to three people who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity, the new company wants to employ LiDAR technology with infrared sensors and cameras “to monitor borders for illegal crossings.” LiDAR is typically used for archaeology and guiding driverless cars, but it’s an area of interest for security firms for real-time human surveillance.

For instance, Industrial Laser Solutions wrote that with Velodyne’s compact LiDAR tech and the People Tracking software from Raytheon/BBN, a camera can track people in real time, day or night, identifying them with precision as they move around. “The user can select a “person of interest” and this tracking information is passed on to a PTZ camera that follows the person.”

Luckey’s new venture won’t stop at border surveillance, it’s supposedly planning to expand the virtual guard posts to other locations and public events. “Mr. Luckey believes his system, which can be mounted on telephone poles,” The Times wrote, “can be built far more cost effectively than Mr. Trump’s proposed wall on the Mexican border — and with fewer obstacles from landowners.” Meaning, people won’t know “the wall” is hunting and tracking humans on their property, and the general public won’t know they’re being tracked (in detail, in real time, being indexed on a computer somewhere), either.

In April, just after he left Facebook (and before Dycus left Facebook), Luckey held a big ‘ol fundraiser to help line the pockets of Texas Senator Ted Cruz — who is currently tied with a Democrat for the 2018 election, and whose state has the largest stretch of border wall with Mexico. Just last month, Luckey had a high-tech border wall pitch meeting with Ryan Zinke, Chuck C. Johnson, and four other Trump team members.

Apparently the thought leader rockstar of moonshot shitposting opened his kimono with synergy! At some point in all this, he hacked his way into ideating some “virtual wall” deliverables: The Times reported that Luckey apparently got an audience with Creepy Steve (Bannon) himself.

If you’re wondering where this hot new startup might pivot to next, maybe just think of it like disruption but for everything Lady Liberty stands for.

Requests for comment and updates to Palmer Luckey on this article, or corrections in regard to NYT’s reporting, did not receive a response by publication time. We will update this article accordingly.

Images: Niall Carson/PA WIRE (Palmer Luckey); Gary Cameron / Reuters (Ted Cruz)

Google’s reCAPTCHA can tell you’re not a bot from your phone

Google’s reCAPTCHA has evolved from distorted text, to street numbers, to “I’m not a robot” tickboxes and, most recently, to their new invisible system. And now the company is bringing its bot-fighting program to Android.

The mobile version will launch with Invisible reCAPTCHA, meaning websites will be able to tell you’re not a bot automatically. Which is good news since dealing with CAPTCHAs on small screens is kind of the worst. However, if you don’t pass the system’s behind the scenes risk analyses and it’s unconvinced that you’re not a bot, whatever puzzle you have to solve to prove your humanity will be optimized for mobile.

Invisible reCAPTCHA uses machine learning and advanced risk analyses to determine if a visitor is a bot or a human without engaging with the users themselves. The technology considers things like your IP address and how you engage with the website to make its assessments.

The reCAPTCHA Android API, part of Google Play Services, is included with Google SafetyNet. And developers will be able to do device and user attestations in the same API for a more streamlined mitigation of security risks.

Android API is available to developers now and the company says to keep an eye out for the iOS version, suggesting it’s just around the corner.

Source: Google

PCIe 4.0 will be twice as fast as today’s slots

We’ve been hearing about a new PCIe specification since 2011. That seems like an eon ago in technology time. PCI-SIG, the community responsible for maintaining these peripheral input/output (I/O) specifications has finally released the specs for PCI Express 4.0, which will give PCs twice the throughput speed (up to 16 GT/s) as previous 3.0 connections while maintaining backward compatibility as well.

Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, or PCIe, is the current standard type of connection protocol for internal devices in your computer. It refers both to the expansion slots on a computer’s motherboard that accept expansion cards as well as the cards themselves. Most motherboards today only include this type of connection slot.

It isn’t just for PCs, either. Devices that use the PCIe protocol can be found in server, storage and even mobile devices. It could make a big difference in faster video cards, SSDs, and other internal configurations, speeding up entire systems. Backward compatibility means that manufacturers won’t have to redesign older systems, either. Any new PCIe devices will be able to play nicely with current PCs as well as new ones. As PCI-SIG members have already been testing the new 4.0 specifications, we could see new products with the faster speeds on shelves as soon as PCIe 4.0 has undergone a final IP review.

According to The Tech Report, PCI-SIG also teased an upcoming PCIe 5.0 specification, which could be ready by 2019. Future PCIe devices could see a throughput of up to 32 GT/s, doubling that available from 4.0 devices. Such speed could work very well in high-end networking environments, allowing for up to 128 GB/s network bandwidth.

Source: The Tech Report

Apple clarifies how tips should work in iOS apps

After a recent crackdown on tips within various live-streaming and messaging apps — particularly in China — it looks as if Apple has finally made it official. If an iOS app allows tipping now, it will have to do so as an in-app purchase. That means that Apple gets 30 percent of all “tips” processed this way.

Apple wants to lock down tips, making sure that developers can’t simply bump users out to an external site to avoid paying the revenue share. The verbiage is bundled into the Apple’s developer guidelines within the section on in-app purchases. It states,

“If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase. Apps may use in-app purchase currencies to enable customers to “tip” digital content providers in the app. Apps may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than IAP.”

Apple users have spent more than $100 billion in the App Store, and the number of apps downloaded continuing to rise. Having clear guidelines about whether tipping is even allowed in an iOS app is great, but developers will have to be willing to part with a significant percentage to do so. And what about livestreaming? If developers must use in-app purchases for tip transactions, that puts them in the middle between Apple and content creators, who would probably like as big a percentage as possible for their actual efforts. Will developers take a cut of the left over 70 percent of tip revenue? Or will they pass the full amount along to the performers, some of whom depend on tip income to survive? Apple is setting a precedent for the former, unfortunately.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Apple Developer

Apple deems Pepe ‘objectionable’ and bans the frog from its App Store

Pepe the Frog is an amphibia non grata at the Apple App Store, according to a rejection letter sent to a developer. The letter, which the developer posted to r/The_Donald subreddit (because of course he did), argues that Pepe is “considered objectionable content” and is therefore banned from appearing in any app in the Apple ecosystem.

“My friend and I came up with the idea of combining shitposting with autistic screeching, so we made this just for fun,” wrote the developer, who seems nice and not at all like the sort of person who would make fun of the disabled for entertainment. The game itself appears to be a run of the mill Flappy Bird ripoff but with more intentional yelling. And while it has been banished from the App Store, the game is still available on Google Play.

Via: Mashable

Source: Motherboard

Apple Officially Allows Users to Tip Content Creators With In-App Purchases

Apple updated its App Store Review Guidelines this week to indicate that developers may now sell virtual currencies in the form of in-app purchases to enable customers to “tip” content creators within apps.

Like all other in-app purchases, Apple will now receive a 30 percent cut from the virtual currencies used for tipping.

Tipping within apps is popular in China, where live-streaming apps like Yinke and Yizhibo have long allowed viewers to tip or give virtual gifts to the stars they watch as a token of gratitude, according to TechCrunch.

Last month, however, Apple reportedly told WeChat and several other Chinese social networking apps to disable their “tip” functions to comply with App Store rules, as many of the virtual currencies sidestepped Apple’s 30 percent cut on purchases.

Now that Apple has formally outlined its stance on the matter, developers who previously feared repercussions from the company may be more inclined to begin offering virtual currencies for users to tip content creators with.

Beyond Apple’s 30 percent cut, it’s up to developers to determine how much of the tips are relayed to the content creators themselves.

Tags: China, App Store Review Guidelines
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You Can Now Personalize Your Apple Pencil With Slickwraps

Slickwraps recently began selling fully customizable skins for the Apple Pencil, which help to give the drawing tool a more personal touch.

Using the Slickwraps design tool, customers can create their own skin with custom images, text, emoji, and clipart. The skins are available in gloss and matte finishes for $8.42 each, regardless of the design, plus shipping.

Slickwraps already sells a wide variety of predesigned Apple Pencil skins, including one that mimics a retro Mac, for $5.42 each plus shipping.

Tags: Apple Pencil, Slickwraps
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