Amazon’s Alexa lands on the HTC U11, and it works like it should

As promised, HTC is finally making it possible for owners of its U11 smartphone to install Amazon’s Alexa. Starting today, those in the US who need yet another voice interface can download the HTC Alexa app from the Google Play Store — we’re told localized versions of Alexa are coming to other countries in the coming weeks. For those keeping count, that brings the U11’s virtual assistant count to three: Google Assistant is also on-board, along with HTC’s non-chatty Sense Companion.

Unsurprisingly, the company doesn’t think three assistants are overkill. VP of product planing Nigel Newby-House sees these three options as complementary, and on some level, he’s got a point. Sense Companion offers non-spoken suggestions and reminders based on your behavior, and Google Assistant still reigns supreme when it comes to general questions. And Alexa? Well, she’s got quite a few skills to tap into — more than 15,000 in fact.

More importantly, this is the first time Alexa really works the way it should on a smartphone. Remember Huawei’s Mate 9? Its Alexa integration felt unsatisfying because wake-words didn’t work the way you’d expect. Talking to Alexa required launching a Huawei Alexa app first — so much for having a hands-free assistant. Once installed, just saying Alexa’s name within earshot of the U11 is all it takes to get her attention. I’ve found no real difference between what Alexa can do on the U11 versus an Echo or Echo Dot. I haven’t been able to test those thousands Alexa skills, but the ones I use most regularly all work just fine.

I spent much of the weekend listening to the U11 play the audiobooks and music I craved, and occasionally asking for cat jokes and attempting 7-minute workouts. (You know, because those last two things go together so well.) Hardly anything went iffy during testing, and the things that did were understandable consequences of squeezing Alexa into a phone. Iffy mobile data connections sometimes delayed Alexa’s (normally quick) responses, and since the U11 lacks the Echo’s far-field microphone array, I sometimes had to yell for Alexa to notice me when I wasn’t close. My only real complaint: if HTC’s Alexa app can’t recognize what you’re saying, it keeps the screen on until you tap the microphone icon to try again or dismiss the Alexa window.

Since the U11 supports dual wake-words, calling out to Google Assistant and Alexa separately works like a charm. And given the U11’s fondness for squeezing, it’s probably no surprise the phone’s Edge Sense can also be used to activate Alexa, too. This doesn’t just feel gimmicky — it sort of defeats Alexa’s entire purpose. Still, more options are always appreciated, and its touches like these that help set HTC’s approach to Alexa apart from the pack. That pack is still admittedly pretty small, but that won’t be the case for long — we already know Motorola is bringing Alexa to its smartphones, and we’d be shocked if they were the last.

IBM’s new mainframe keeps everything encrypted, all the time

Data breaches are bad enough by themselves, but they’re made worse when companies don’t bother to (or can’t) encrypt all their info. It’s tantamount to giving hackers the keys to the kingdom. But what to do? IBM thinks it has a simple solution: encrypt absolutely everything. Its latest Z mainframe system now has enough power to automatically encrypt all the data associated with an app or service, whether it’s in transit or sitting idle in a database. According to IBM, conventional systems based on x86 processors only encrypt “limited slices” of information, while the new Z has enough power (18 times more, in fact) to lock everything down as a matter of course.

The new platform can also “self-destruct” encryption keys the moment there’s any tampering, and quickly encrypts the programming interfaces that tie apps and services together. And the Z is faster overall, regardless of the task at hand: there’s three times the memory (a hefty 32TB), three times faster input/output and much lower lag when talking to a storage area network. The hardware should juggle many more transactions (like purchases at an online store) even as it boosts their overall security.

Naturally, there are catches to this utopian vision of internet security. While IBM plays an important role in online commerce (its transaction engine handles 87 percent of credit card payments), many companies would likely have to upgrade before you’d see the benefit. Any mass migration would probably take years, if it happens at all. And of course, IBM’s solution doesn’t stop hackers from taking data — it just prevents them from reading that data. There’s a chance, however slim, that the most determined perpetrators will find a way to decrypt content once they have it.

Nonetheless, this technology could be a big step forward if it lives up to IBM’s hype. If you can assume that your sensitive data is always encrypted, you won’t have to worry quite so much that thieves might go on a shopping spree with your credit card. This might also deter crooks if they know that they’re unlikely to hit the jackpot when they crack a company’s security.

Source: IBM

Facebook goes all-in on video with latest update, new app for TV

Why it matters to you

Facebook is a prime destination for video, and its latest updates seek to improve the viewing experience for users.

Although Facebook isn’t necessarily thought of as a video platform, it does provide a massive portal to video content. Facebook is aware of this, which is why the social network is rolling out new video playback features on its mobile app, and introducing another app for TVs.

Facebook listed the video-focused updates in a post on its Newsroom blog. For starters, videos in the News Feed will now autoplay with sound turned on by default, and audio will fade in and out as you scroll past them. A few weeks ago, the social media giant appeared to make good on that promise in earnest, as an increasing number of people are seeing a message that reads, “We’re always working to make Facebook a better place to watch videos. That’s why videos now play with sound on automatically. Use the volume icon on any video to make the sound right for you.”

Apparently, Facebook decided to make the change back in February because users apparently expected to hear sound as they scrolled through their News Feed. “After testing sound on in News Feed and hearing positive feedback, we’re slowly bringing it to more people. With this update, sound fades in and out as you scroll through videos in News Feed, bringing those videos to life,” Facebook noted in a blog post.

But don’t worry — if you don’t want the sound automatically on in Facebook, you have the option of turning it off, both on the iOS and Android versions of the app. Just select the menu button and make your way over to account settings and sounds, and turn off “News Feed Start With Sound.”

Facebook’s decision will likely help it become a major player in video, encouraging people to watch more of them and allowing advertisers to more easily reach people.

A more welcome addition might be the larger preview for vertically formatted videos. Facebook notes it has been testing this layout for some accounts as well, and soon it will roll out to all iOS and Android users. The new viewing experience also sports a smoother animation to scale to full-screen more seamlessly, as well as a redesigned progress bar with thumbnails to make navigating videos much more convenient.

Finally, Facebook is adding watch-and-scroll functionality similar to what Google implemented quite a while ago in its YouTube app. Users can now minimize video to a picture-and-picture view while continuing to browse their News Feed. On Android, videos even continue to play outside of the app — similar to how the social network’s Chat Heads messaging feature operates.

In addition to the update for mobile, Facebook also announced it is making the move to bigger screens with a video app for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Samsung Smart TV. The new app allows for easy viewing of videos shared by pages and friends, and also recommends content based on interest. It expands upon a feature the social network rolled out last fall, which introduced the ability to stream videos straight to a TV from any device. Facebook says it is working to bring the app to additional platforms in the future.

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Update: Facebook is now rolling out its auto-sound feature on its Android and iOS apps to more people.

Our favorite $200 laptop gives you way more than your money’s worth

If you’re a student looking for your first laptop, or someone who doesn’t want to spend too much cash on a PC, then HP has you covered. The impressive HP 14-AN013NR is easily the best laptop under $200, and one that doesn’t sacrifice much to achieve its low price point. There is a good selection of cheap laptops available, but with a $200 price tag, nothing really compares to HP’s budget-based offering.

Most inexpensive laptops tend to have the computing power of a smartphone, but HP’s laptop comes equipped with an AMD E2 7110 quad core processor. It’s similar to the Intel i3 4005U processor, which runs on laptops that are as expensive as $1,100. The processor in the HP 13-AN013NR is significantly faster than the Intel i3, however, especially when it comes to GPU performance.

But the HP laptop is the head of its class in more ways than one. Its AMD Radeon R2 graphics card is way better than what you’d find in most $200 laptops, and the laptop’s 1,920 x 1,080-pixel display provides a full HD experience, something most affordable laptops avoid in order to keep costs down.

That said, it’s not all roses for HP’s offering.

It only comes with 32GB of storage, and after Windows, McAfee, and other pre-installed software, you’re left with a mere 13GB of storage. That’s not even enough memory to download and re-watch the last season of Game of Thrones before its return.

Thankfully, the laptop comes loaded with two USB 2.0 ports, as well as a USB 3.0 port and an SD card slot. For an easy storage fix, you can also connect your external hard drive, SD card, or flash drive. You can even swap out the SSD drive in a matter of minutes, thanks to the laptop’s easy-to-unscrew bottom. This also allows you to switch out the laptop’s 4GB of RAM for 8GB. Just don’t go over 8GB — that’s all the computer can handle.

Overall, if you’re not planning on using your computer for high-power tasks such as gaming or video editing, then the HP 14-AN013NR could be the perfect laptop for you.

David Cogen, a regular contributor here at Digital Trends, runs TheUnlockr.com, a popular tech blog that focuses on tech news, tips and tricks, and the latest tech. You can also find him over at Twitter discussing the latest tech trends.

HTC keyboard ads likely an error, but damage is already done [Updated]

HTC is telling users to roll back the latest stock keyboard update, which clutters up the screen with ads.

Update, 10:50pm ET: HTC has confirmed to AC that the ads were mistakenly included. An HTC spokesperson provided the following statement:

Due to an error, some HTC customers have reported seeing ads on their phone’s keyboard. This is absolutely not the experience we intended, and we’re working to immediately fix the error and remove the ads as quickly as possible.

Original story: Ads in the stock keyboard app on a flagship smartphone. Added quietly via an app update. Which then asks you to pay to remove them.

You’d be hard pressed to come up with a more comically villainous thing for a phone manufacturer, or app developer, to pull on its users. Yet that’s what’s been happening to some HTC phone owners over the past day, as spotted first by Reddit user “Azirack” on his HTC 10.

HTC 10 owners seem to be worst affected (we’re not seeing it on the newer U11 for what it’s worth), with the ad bar taking up a good chunk of screen real estate. There’s understandable outrage among HTC owners whose phones have started coughing up ads every time they open the keyboard. The consensus, obviously, is that this is not an OK place for ads to be appearing.

@htc why I see adds using default keyboard of the phone that I paid for? This is really unbeliavable! Are you serious? pic.twitter.com/eWx9MTCyEf

— Şakir İMREN (@sakirimren) July 16, 2017

An error by keyboard developer TouchPal is the most likely explanation.

HTC hasn’t gotten back to us with an official statement just yet. (Update: See statement above.) The company’s official Twitter account is telling angry users to uninstall the latest update to TouchPal via the Settings app, suggesting that the appearance of ads in this update is a mistake. Most likely, code from regular (non-HTC) version of TouchPal, which does include an ad-supported trial version alongside a subscription-supported paid option, made its way into the HTC Sense version. (Both variants live on Google Play, but are updated separately.)

Plus, after well over a decade making smartphones, it’s hard to believe HTC would be stupid enough to OK something like this.

However, it does demonstrate one major pitfall of outsourcing your stock keyboard to a third-party developer. HTC saves money in doing so, but catches all the flack when things go wrong. Customers seeing ads on their expensive new handsets aren’t mad at the relatively unknown TouchPal, they’re angry at HTC. As it looks to build on solid momentum around the U11’s launch, such a dent in its reputation among existing customers is something it really doesn’t need.

TouchPal for HTC Sense had tanked to an average review score of 2.6 stars on Google Play at the time of writing.

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Google wins fight with Labor Department over pay gap data

Google appears to have emerged mostly triumphant in its fight with the Department of Labor over supplying pay gap data. An administrative law judge has ruled that the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs overstepped its boundaries by asking for as much data as it did when trying to address reported pay disparities between men and women. According to the decision, the OFCCP’s requests were “intrusive on employee privacy, unduly burdensome and insufficiently focused.” To put it succinctly, the Office couldn’t justify why it needed as much info as it wanted.

The Department had been asking for job data up to 15 years old, and wanted far-ranging personal data that included addresses and contact info for over 25,000 employees. In theory, sharing that material could have exposed staff to identity theft in the event of a government data breach, which the judge saw as a realistic possibility.

Officials aren’t coming away completely empty-handed. Provided the decision is finalized, Google says it’ll honor the rest of the order and provide the “much more limited” data the judge said was acceptable. That includes the contacts for a relatively small sample of 8,000 workers. Still, this definitely isn’t what the Labor Department wanted — and it’ll likely have to be more cautious the next time it’s investigating pay problems with its tech contractors.

Source: Google

Stop sniffing your pits and let the Kukun Body tell you if you smell

Why it matters to you

Embarrassing BO is everyone’s worst nightmare, but luckily, there’s now a device that can help you avoid all that.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not, in fact, the responsibility of your significant other to sniff your pits to tell you if you smell. Sure, he or she may do it for you, but that’s just one of the downsides of love. Luckily, there is another someone, or rather, something that can sniff your pits. It’s called the Kukun Body, and it’s a tiny little device  that connects to your smartphone and will tell you if you reek.

Finding its place among the sometimes outlandish yet wonderful ideas to come out of Japan, the Kukun Body will scan four odor-producing body parts — the feet, the area behind the ear, the head, and the pits. The device scans for three different smells, namely sweat, middle-fat odors, and what the Japanese call karesihu, or “old age smell.” Once the device is done doing its thing, the companion app will tell you what you need to hear, even if it’s unpleasant.

If you really need to deal with your B.O., the app will tell you, “Immediately care is needed.” Other times, the news might not be quite so … upsetting.

Developed by Daisuke Koda, the device is actually a couple years in the making. Koda is the incubation lead at Konica Minolta, Japan’s business innovation center, and told the Guardian that he was inspired to create such a device after a conversation about smelly summer days with some colleagues.

“We looked for a device to measure body smell, only to find that there was no device at all to tell the different types of smells,” Koda said. “That prompted us to think it might be an opportunity for a new business and we continued our research further deeper.”

Apparently, in Japan, body odor is the primary etiquette concern in the workplace. But of course, telling someone they smell bad is an even bigger etiquette no-no. “We see challenges that these people are aware of but nobody has a solution for,” Kida noted.

For the time being, the Kukun Body is only available to folks in Japan, and is set to launch later in the year for about $265. You can actually help support the Kukun Body by donating to its crowdfunding page, though that still won’t get you a device of your own.

Alphabet’s Verily is about to release 20 million mosquitos in Fresno

Why it matters to you

Controlling the mosquito population of the world is becoming an increasingly salient issue as diseases like Zika continue to spread. Luckily, Verily thinks it may have a solution.

It may sound counterintuitive, but Alphabet’s life sciences unit Verily is releasing about 20 million mosquitos in Fresno, California in order to fight Zika, the mosquito-borne illness. It’s part of Verily’s Debug Project, an initiative announced last October with the mission of reducing “the devastating global health impact that disease-carrying mosquitoes inflict on people around the world.” And now, Verily is launching Debug Fresno, the company’s first field study in the U.S. that will test a mosquito control method that involves sterile insect technique.

In essence, the 20 million mosquitos Verily is releasing are all sterile males that have been treated with Wolbachia, a naturally occurring bacterium. The test is said to be the largest release of sterile male mosquitos in the U.S. thus far. Over the next 20 weeks, these bugs will be released in two neighborhoods around 300 acres large. The hope is that when these sterile males mate with wild females, which can carry and transmit a number of diseases including Zika, dengue, and chikungunya, the resulting eggs will not hatch. Verily will determine the success of its test by comparing the adult population density and egg hatching of this particular kind of mosquito in the targeted neighborhoods to two control neighborhoods.

And don’t worry — male mosquitos do not bite, so even though you might be seeing more of these critters around, you won’t be itching as a result.

Linus Upson, a senior engineer at Verily, told the MIT Technology Review that this could ultimately become a cost effective way to control mosquito populations, and get rid of diseases (though he didn’t say how much exactly this experiment actually costs). “If we really want to be able to help people globally, we need to be able to produce a lot of mosquitoes, distribute them to where they need to be, and measure the populations at very, very low costs,” he said. “We want to show this can work in different kinds of environments,” he told the magazine.

So look out, Fresno. You may hear a lot more buzzing in the coming weeks, but rest assured, it’s all for good purpose.

Porsche installs its first high-speed electric car chargers

Porsche knows that electric vehicles are the future, and it just took a big step to prepare for that future. The performance car brand just opened a new office in Berlin, and the new facility includes the company’s first two ultra-fast 800-volt chargers (one is pictured below). They can ‘only’ charge existing EVs at up to a 150kW charge rate (which is still faster than a 120kW Tesla Supercharger), but they can handle up to 350kW for future cars. For Porsche’s upcoming Mission E, that would mean an 80 percent charge in 15 minutes. That’s longer than a typical stop at the gas station, but short enough that you don’t have to plan your EV trips around charging station visits.

It won’t stop there, of course. Another high-speed station is under construction at Porsche’s American headquarters in Atlanta, and the firm expects to ramp up installations by the time the Mission E arrives in 2019. In other words, early adopters will have at least some options for topping up quickly.

Porsche won’t be alone for long. It’s partnering with other car companies on installing 350kW-capable charging stations across Europe, and Tesla vows to compete with even faster chargers. Still, it’s a start — it’s laying the groundwork for a time when you’ll rarely have to think about where and when to charge an EV.

Bottom image credit: KFZ-Betrieb

Via: Electrek

Source: KFZ-Betrieb (translated)

Flat microscope for the brain could help restore lost eyesight

You’d probably prefer that doctors restore lost sight or hearing by directly repairing your eyes and ears, but Rice University is one step closer to the next best thing: transmitting info directly to your brain. It’s developing a flat microscope (the creatively titled FlatScope) that sits on your brain to both monitor and trigger neurons modified to be fluorescent when active. It should not only capture much more detail than existing brain probes (the team is hoping to see “a million” neurons), but reach levels deep enough that it should shed light on how the mind processes sensory input. And that, in turn, opens the door to controlling sensory input.

FlatScope is part of a broader DARPA initiative that aims to create a high-resolution neural interface. If technologies like the microscope lead to a way to quickly interpret neuron activity, it should be possible to craft sensors that send audiovisual data to the brain and effectively take over for any missing senses. Any breakthrough on that level is a long way off (at best) when even FlatScope exists as just a prototype, but there is some hope that blindness and deafness will eventually become things of the past.

Source: Rice University