Google testing a new touch-oriented design on Chrome OS

Chrome OS is getting closer to being tablet-friendly!

Once upon a time, Chrome OS wasn’t the most touch-friendly system. There weren’t many touchscreen models of Chromebooks, and there was no real rush to fix how a system designed for a mouse and keyboard wasn’t really designed for touchscreen input.

Well, Chrome OS has come a long way since then, and now that touchscreen Chromebooks are becoming more and more popular, thanks in no small part to Android apps jumping to Chromebooks, and Google has been slowly making the system more and more touch-friendly. That change has now spread to a new Chrome desktop, as evidenced in a YouTube video from Chromium evangelist François Beaufort.

The video below shows a new Chrome desktop that’s now available in the Chrome OS Canary channel. The new version seems to smoosh the app launcher window onto the bottom of the screen when you tap the Apps button rather than popping it up in a new window. It displays the search bar, complete with an easy-to-tap voice search button, and a small smattering of suggested apps. You drag up on this bar to bring up the full app drawer, which looks very Android-like. The Chrome OS desktop has needed an overhaul for a bit, and while it’s still early days, if the app launcher is going to act this much like Android, maybe we’ll get another Android feature in icon packs… or maybe that’s just the themer in me begging for a bigger canvas.

At any rate, this is a Canary channel feature, so you may not want to try it on a Chromebook you depend on, but if your Chromebook is more of a supplemental device, this might just be for you.

Chromebooks

• The best Chromebooks
• Should you buy a Chromebook?
• Google Play is coming to Chromebooks
• Acer Chromebook 14 review
• Join our Chromebook forums

What other things do I need to use Google Home?

You probably have everything you need to use Google Home.

Google Home aims to make your life easier, but you will need a few things in order to use it. Don’t worry though, chances are you already have access to the three integral parts of using Google Home. We’ve got the details for you here.

Internet, account, and apps

There are three prerequisites you need to possess before using Google Home:

• Internet service and an in-home Wi-Fi connection
• A Google account
• Apps to connect the service to

The odds are that you already have Wi-Fi where you plan to use Google Home, a Google account, and apps that are compatible with Google Home installed on your phone. If this is the case, then you’ve already done the hard work of making sure that you have everything necessary to use Google Home.

You’ll use your Google Account as authentication of who you are when linking apps, making purchases, or accessing your Google Play library. Once you plug Google Home in and set it up, it’ll use the internet in order to access goods and services, as well as answer any questions you have. No Wi-Fi means no Google Home services.

Last but certainly not least are the apps you’ll want to link with Google Home. These apps include Spotify or Pandora for music, as well as apps for your connected home (like Nest or Hue). By connecting to your existing account, you’re able to connect to everything from a single hub. Probably the most important app to use with Google Home, though, is IFTTT which can let you use Google Home and your connected accessories to personalize your experience.

How to connect Google home and IFTTT

Questions?

Do you have questions about what is needed in order to use Google Home? Are you having issues getting set up? Let us know in the comments below!

Google Home

• Google Home review
• These services work with Google Home
• Google Home vs. Amazon Echo
• Join our Google Home forums!

Google Store Best Buy Target

Play ‘Horizon Zero Dawn’ all over again with New Game+

The team behind the popular open world game Horizon Zero Dawn announced an expansion pack called The Frozen Wilds last month, but that’s not all they have up their sleeve. Today, they released patch 1.30 for the game, which introduces some exciting new features.

The most eagerly anticipated addition is a New Game+ option. Now, players can start a new game without losing their character skills or their inventory. It’s worth noting, though, that while you can continue to collect XP beyond the level of 50, characters’ progressions are capped at that level. New Game+ also introduces additional unlockable content, including new trophies, face paint and the ability to change Aloy’s focus.

Additionally, Horizon Zero Dawn is introducing an Ultra Hard difficulty level. While players will normally be able to choose a lower difficulty level when embarking on New Game+, those who select Ultra Hard will be locked into it for their New Game+.

Of course, the patch also includes bug fixes and other small enhancements. The addition of New Game+ will likely excite the game’s many fans; hopefully it’s enough to keep players hooked until The Frozen Wilds releases later this fall.

Source: PlayStation Blog

Motorola may introduce its X4 phone on July 25th

Today, Motorola sent out a press invitation to a launch event on July 25th in New York. The question is, what exactly are they launching?

The invitation is an animated GIF with the text “You won’t want to miss this.” Down below is the hashtag #hellomotoworld, along with the date (July 25th) and location (New York City). The background image is a blue hallway that lights up in different colors.

In May, a roadmap of Motorola’s 2017 phone lineup leaked, and it was pretty ambitious. It’s safe to say that the July 25th event is likely a phone launch, and judging from the invitation, it might be a big one. Speculation is heavy on which phones exactly will be announced — people are clamoring to see the Moto X4, which may be the first non-Google phone able to use Google Fi. Possible specs for this phone include 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a fingerprint reader, a 3,800mAH battery and a Snapdragon 660 processor.

The launch could also cover the Moto Z2 Force, the sequel to last year’s flagship Z Force. According to leaks, this 0.24-inch thick phone will have a Snapdragon 835 chip, dual cameras, a 5.5-inch display and the return of the headphone jack. We’ll just have to wait and see what Motorola announces at the end of the month.

Source: CNET

Uber sought a Google partnership before they became bitter rivals

New court filings in the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit document the breakdown between the two companies’ cooperation and potential partnership. The filings contain a series of emails between former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Google senior VP David Drummond, who at the time was also an Uber board member. The exchange, which happened in early 2015, show Kalanick becoming increasingly concerned over rumors that Google was looking to start its own ride-sharing service with the self-driving cars it was developing. From the emails, it appears that Uber was looking to partner with Google in its autonomous vehicle efforts and Kalanick, worried about the rumors, repeatedly sought a meeting with Alphabet CEO Larry Page.

In one email from March of 2015, Kalanick reached out to Drummond after receiving information that Google would be launching a self-driving service in a few months. In it, Kalanick said, “We get stuff like this more than I would like. A meeting with Larry could calm this down if it’s not true but he has been avoiding any meeting with me since last fall. Without any dialogue we get pushed into the assumption that Google is competing in the short term and has probably been planning to do so for quite a bit longer than has been let on. I hope I’m wrong here, just need to do a meeting with Larry ASAP to get clarity and a mutual understanding of how to do a proper partnership here.”

Kalanick did get his meeting with Page, but it’s what happened after the meeting that Uber’s attorneys want to depose Page about and why Uber filed the emails with the court. They claim that Page attended that meeting to discuss a potential partnership with Uber but later decided to compete with them instead. In their argument for a Page deposition, Uber’s attorneys said, “Any such competitive business decisions are relevant to the issues in and motivations behind this lawsuit, and to damages.”

In a statement about the emails, a Waymo spokesperson highlighted that this case is about stolen technology, saying, “Uber continues to mischaracterize our claims in order to distract people from the bottom line: that Uber is using stolen Waymo trade secrets in their technology. We look forward to presenting our evidence at trial and respectfully await the Court’s ruling on Uber’s deposition requests.”

An Uber spokesperson said, “There is no substitute for these depositions, which would resolve some key unanswered questions. For instance: why, after Google learned of the alleged downloading of 14,000 files, did Mr. Page not alert Uber’s then-CEO to that fact when they spoke? Simultaneously, Google was rejecting a partnership with Uber, choosing instead to compete. This — and the lack of evidence supporting Waymo’s case — begs the obvious question: was this lawsuit actually motivated by the downloading of the files, or was it an attempt to slow down a competitor?”

Via: Gizmodo

Source: Business Insider, Buzzfeed

FAA offers registration refunds for casual drone pilots

Remember when you had to register your drone, regardless of whether it was hulking thousand-dollar pro model, or some cheap toy off Amazon? Then, remember when the FAA then realised it violated its own rules? Well, that decision in the US Court of Appeals means that the ever-growing drone pilots of America can now apply for a refund if they had previously registered their flying ‘bot.

There are rules, however: To qualify for the refund, owners need to reiterate that their drone is used only for recreation and in accordance with community safety guidelines — of course. If you’re ticking those boxes, you can find the rest of the application form here, so send that off and start imagining what you’re going to do with that sweet fiver.

While the US still figures out how to keep a check on drones, the European Commission recently unveiled a blueprint of standards that will unify laws across the EU, starting 2019. No-one appears to have found the perfect balance of drone monitoring and civilian freedom just yet.

Via: CNET

Source: FAA

Kodi boxes ‘threaten to undermine’ the UK’s anti-piracy efforts

Media centre software Kodi is once again taking flak for its role in facilitating digital piracy today. An announcement from the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has praised “innovative” services like Netflix and Spotify for keeping Brits on the straight and narrow, but notes that the scale of online piracy remains “stable” — which is just a positive way of saying no gains have been made in tackling infringement over the past 12 months, following several years of decline. While not mentioning Kodi specifically (which isn’t unusual), the IPO states that “illicitly adapted set-top boxes” are partly to blame for this, and “threaten to undermine recent progress.”

According to the IPO, research conducted by Kantar Media in March found that roughly 7 million Brits are guilty of online piracy, with 13 percent of those using modified set-top boxes to get their fill. (Note that these figures are based on a survey of 5,267 people and extrapolated to represent the entire UK population.) Additional data in The Telegraph suggests that while music and films are becoming less attractive to pirates, TV shows have grown in popularity. Among people who watch shows illegally, 16 percent did so through Kodi and 17 percent used streaming website Putlocker.

Torrent sites like The Pirate Bay have long been in the crosshairs of the authorities and copyright holders, and still are — the UK’s ‘educational’ piracy email alert programme, which began this year, relies almost entirely on public torrent data to function. But set-top boxes capable of streaming films, TV shows and sports events illegally have been receiving much more attention of late, and most finger-wagging has been directed firmly at Kodi. While it’s an entirely legitimate media centre application, it supports third-party plug-ins that modify the software to access pirate streams.

Between high-profile criminal cases targeting ‘fully loaded’ box sellers, the Premier League winning the right to take down servers powering football streams, the EU ruling that preconfigured set-top boxes are indeed illegal and lawsuits aimed at the add-on community directly, Kodi is rarely out of the headlines these days. The UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) has even threatened to start tracking down the owners of Kodi boxes individually, not just sellers.

Today’s announcement from the IPO also named stream-ripping as the new go-to tool for UK music pirates. Research commissioned by the IPO and PRS for Music — a royalties collection society — found that the use of services that scrape tunes from YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify and the like, turning them into downloadable MP3s, increased by over 140 percent between 2014 and 2016. Apparently, it now accounts for almost 70 percent of music piracy.

YouTube is unsurprisingly the most popular primary source, and one of the top ripping sites that turns video links into MP3s is currently being sued by music labels in the US. Interestingly, of the over 9,000 people surveyed as part of the research, 31 percent of those who admitted to stream-ripping claimed they only did so in order to download music they already owned. Yeah, sure…

Source: UK Intellectual Property Office

Here’s why CNN isn’t ‘doxing’ anyone

With the addition of three sentences, CNN turned a relevant news story into an utter mess. This week the organization uncovered the identity of HanAssholeSolo, the Reddit user who created the GIF tweeted round the world: Donald Trump beating up a man with the CNN logo plastered over his head. Media outlets also discovered HanAssholeSolo’s history of publishing anti-Semitic and racist messages on Reddit, and he deleted his account after sharing a lengthy apology.

Here’s where CNN messed up: In an effort to appear transparent, the network said it would not publish HanAssholeSolo’s name, as he had “shown remorse” and promised not to post bigoted messages in the future. This segment concluded, “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.”

CNN was immediately accused of blackmailing the Redditor, while some outlets — mainly far-right ones — took things a step further, claiming the news organization was actually doxing him.

This is not true. CNN is not doxing anyone.

But, to better understand why CNN’s tactics were simply ominous and self-destructive, rather than potentially illegal, it’s crucial to answer the following question: What is doxing?

This is going to take more than one line.

Doxing is all about control. In a doxing attempt, attackers hunt down and publish personal information about someone with the intent to cause harm, sharing items including addresses, phone numbers, places of employment, sexual orientation, age, social media accounts and even family members’ information. Generally, there’s an appeal to dig up even more sensitive information and further harass the victim — calling dozens of times a day, sending items to their address or actually showing up at their home.

At its heart, doxing is an intimidation tactic meant to scare and silence someone — generally, someone the attacker disagrees with online.

Doxing was one of the main weapons deployed by proponents of Gamergate, a loosely organized movement that led to the widespread harassment of women in the video game community around 2014. Gamergate targeted game developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu and Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian, among others.

The FBI got involved, and earlier this year the Bureau released a redacted 173-page document outlining its Gamergate investigation, including swaths of abusive tweets, emails and messages. One suspect apparently admitted to calling and threatening a victim 40 to 50 times a day, though it appears this person didn’t face any punishment. The entire investigation was closed in September 2015.

Felicia Day, actress and all-around nerd goddess, penned a blog post in October 2014 about her personal reaction to Gamergate and to explain why she hadn’t spoken up about the controversy before then. Essentially, she wrote, she was scared of being doxed:

I have been terrified of inviting a deluge of abusive and condescending tweets into my timeline. I did one simple @ reply to one of the main victims several weeks back, and got a flood of things I simply couldn’t stand to read directed at me. I had to log offline for a few days until it went away. I have tried to retweet a few of the articles I’ve seen dissecting the issue in support, but personally I am terrified to be doxxed for even typing the words “Gamer Gate.” I have had stalkers and restraining orders issued in the past, I have had people show up on my doorstep when my personal information was HARD to get. To have my location revealed to the world would give a entry point for a few mentally ill people who have fixated on me, and allow them to show up and make good on the kind of threats I’ve received that make me paranoid to walk around a convention alone. I haven’t been able to stomach the risk of being afraid to get out of my car in my own driveway because I’ve expressed an opinion that someone on the internet didn’t agree with.

Day was doxed minutes after publishing that blog post.

Doxing is a tool of silence, and it doesn’t even have to be deployed to have monstrous effects. Its mere threat can close people out of conversations, pushing them away from entire communities and fandoms. Yes, even nerd goddesses.

Especially nerd goddesses. The Pew Research Center found in 2014 that men are more often the victims of name-calling, physical threats and embarrassment tactics in the digital world, while women “experience particularly severe forms of online harassment,” including stalking and sexual harassment.

“Young women, those 18-24, experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels: 26 percent of these young women have been stalked online, and 25 percent were the target of online sexual harassment,” Pew writes. “In addition, they do not escape the heightened rates of physical threats and sustained harassment common to their male peers and young people in general.”

Take former NFL player Chris Kluwe, for example. He railed against Gamergate just days before Day published her blog post, and he took a decidedly more antagonistic tone:

Dear #Gamergaters,

Do you know why you piss me the fuck off?

Because you’re lazy. You’re ignorant. You are a blithering collection of wannabe Wikipedia philosophers, drunk on your own buzzwords, incapable of forming an original thought. You display a lack of knowledge stunning in its scope, a fundamental disregard of history and human nature so pronounced that makes me wonder if lead paint is a key component of your diet. You think you’re making piercing arguments when, in actuality, you’re throwing a temper tantrum that would embarrass a three-year-old.

And that was just the intro. However, Kluwe wasn’t doxed minutes or even weeks later. Kluwe hit Twitter the following day to drive home the fact that attackers were clearly targeting women, something Gamergate proponents have long denied: “And for the record, none of you fucking #Gamergate tools tried to dox me, even after I tore you a new one. I’m not even a tough target.”

Kluwe discovered plans to dox him on a public message board about a month later, though it’s unclear whether the attackers were tied to Gamergate at all.

Gender not only dictates likely victims of a doxing attack; it also plays a role in how individuals view privacy threats. Women are more often the target of sexual harassment and stalking attempts online, and are therefore inundated with warnings about keeping accounts, photos and all personal information exceptionally private. Men face privacy threats and are reminded to keep their digital lives on lock, but they’re generally spared the relentless, buzzing anxiety that comes with being a woman online.

Violet Blue offers a real-world example of this perspective gap in her book The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy: A man and a woman, a couple, hear Snapchat has been hacked, and users’ real names and phone numbers are out in the wild. The man brushes it off, saying it’s just his name and number, no big deal. The woman, however, is immediately concerned. She sees a real, increased risk of stalking or harassment.

“It isn’t a story about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ ways of thinking about privacy,” Blue writes. “Their reactions just show a great example of the difference between what women and men see as risky exposure. He didn’t think it was a big deal for anyone to have his number, username, and real name. She, on the other hand, said it made her worried.”

Doxing can be a precursor to stalking, which is one reason it’s so unsettling — to say the least.

But doxing is terrifying enough on its own for people of any gender, stripping away layers of privacy and inviting the skeevy underbelly of the internet into the victim’s life, home and bedroom. It transforms every stranger into a potential attacker, every car driving by the house into a mystery stalker, every phone call into a fountain of anxiety.

This simply isn’t the case with the CNN controversy. Publishing a relevant person’s name as part of a news article — a standard journalistic practice that answers the question, “Who said what?” — is not the same as sharing their location or contact information and instructing others to make their life hell. As for claims of blackmail, the Redditor apparently apologized and deleted his account before speaking with the news organization. But, that’s a different topic altogether.

CNN certainly made a mess of things, but it definitely did not dox anyone.

The best multiroom wireless speaker system

By Chris Heinonen

This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best technology. When readers choose to buy The Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article here.

We’ve spent hundreds of hours over several years testing multiroom wireless speaker systems in every possible room—even outside—and Sonos remains the best option for most homes. It supports the widest variety of streaming services, offers excellent sound quality across its lineup at varying prices, and its apps offer unparalleled ease of use. The competition is catching up, but Sonos still offers the most complete and reliable package overall.

Who should get this

Multiroom wireless speaker systems are for people who want to be able to play music throughout their home and easily control it from their phone, tablet, or computer. These systems let you play different tracks on each speaker, or group them together to play the same tracks. They support both local media libraries and streaming services, allowing you to access music from almost any source. They make it easy to expand your system by just adding another speaker or zone.

If you have already invested in a different multiroom wireless speaker system and it has access to all the services you need, there really is no reason to upgrade. And if you care only about music in a single room, or don’t care about multiple sources, other options will work for less money, such as Bluetooth or AirPlay speakers.

How we picked and tested

Over the years we’ve looked at 15 different whole-home audio systems and performed long-term, hands-on testing on nine of them by listening to local files and a handful of streaming services. In the case of soundbars, we watched movies and TV as well.

Since we first started testing, what makes for an ideal system has changed a bit. These days, we evaluate each system based on how many online streaming music services it offers, whether it streams directly from the source or through your phone or computer, how easy it was to control the system via an app or voice control, and whether it offered Bluetooth or Airplay as a fallback solution for when your preferred streaming service isn’t supported.

We particularly like flexible systems that allow you to group speakers together to stream the same music or to combine speakers in stereo pairs. We also prioritized systems that have a wide selection of products at a wide range of prices, and make it easy to add more speakers or zones on your own. Finally, we preferred systems with dual-band Wi-Fi support for situations where interference occurs from other devices on the 2.4 GHz spectrum.

Our pick

Sonos offers many innovative features such as Trueplay, which helped tune this Play:5’s sound to make up for its corner placement. Photo: Chris Heinonen

The Sonos system is the best multiroom wireless speaker system because it supports the most services, has a wide selection of great-sounding speakers, is easy to search, and has a well-organized app that runs on almost all major platforms. Sonos currently offers support for 49 streaming services, as well as playback for your local music library and podcasts, and adds new services all the time. It also keeps its platform up to date by introducing new features like Trueplay room-correction technology.

Sonos sells a range of speakers, starting at the low end with the Play:1 and extending up to the Play:5s. If you already own speakers, a turntable, or a Bluetooth receiver and simply want to integrate it with your Sonos system, you can use the Connect, or the Connect:Amp if they’re passive speakers. And for your TV, Sonos offers the Playbar and Playbase soundbars, as well as the Sub.

The Sonos app is well-designed and runs on iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS. From the app you can control all of the speakers or zones, group them in any combination, adjust the volume of each individual speaker (even if they’re grouped), search for music on any of your streaming services, create playlists, mark your favorites, and more. The speakers themselves offer very few controls, only volume and a play/pause button in most cases. The app handles the rest. It also makes it very easy to set up and expand a system no matter how technically inclined you are.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Currently, no Sonos device offers Bluetooth or AirPlay support, which mean if your favorite streaming service is missing, it is hard to get it onto a Sonos device. We would also like to see a cheaper way to get line-in for hooking up a Bluetooth receiver, record player, or other device. Currently, your only options are the $350 Connect or the $500 Play:5.

Also, Sonos products are stuck on the standard 2.4 GHz band unless you buy the company’s optional bridge that creates its own Wi-Fi network. This can be a problem if you live in an apartment or condo building with a large number of 2.4 Ghz routers causing interference.

More affordable, with voice control

If you aren’t ready to invest a few hundred dollars into a Sonos system, the Google Chromecast Audio platform offers an affordable and compelling alternative. Like Sonos, Chromecast-equipped devices play music via Wi-Fi directly from many of the same streaming services, and can group speakers into zones. However, it doesn’t have a universal app to control playback and there’s no way to search across all your services at once. As a cheap way to get into wireless multiroom audio streaming that you can expand at any time, the Chromecast Audio is almost impossible to beat, but it behaves more like a feature you add-on to a product rather than a controlled ecosystem.

The main advantage of Chromecast Audio is that it’s an open platform that can be built into any Wi-Fi–connected audio product or added to virtually any audio product with a 3.5 mm headphone jack (or an optical output with an optional cable) via the cheap Chromecast Audio dongle. This flexibility is Chromecast’s main strength and gives manufacturers a lot of room to experiment with different feature sets, but it does have a downside–there’s a lack of control over who supports what and an inability to enforce quality standards.

Ironically, Google Chromecast’s search features are lacking compared with Sonos’s. There’s no unified Chromecast app, so instead it relies on each individual service’s app for finding content and controlling playback. However, not every app and service supports Chromecast—Apple and Amazon’s offerings are notable absentees—though this is less of an issue if you buy Chromecast-enabled speakers that also have Bluetooth or AirPlay. You also cannot currently form a stereo pair of speakers, though that is supposed to roll out in a future update in 2017. Though it lacks the controlled ecosystem and user-friendliness of Sonos, the cheaper price, flexibility, and rapid expansion of Chromecast Audio make it an attractive option, and we can see it becoming the top pick in the future if the flaws are corrected.

This guide may have been updated by The Wirecutter. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

Note from The Wirecutter: When readers choose to buy our independently chosen editorial picks, we may earn affiliate commissions that support our work.

Google DeepMind teams with Open AI to prevent a robot uprising

If you’re worried that one day the robots will revolt and either exterminate or subjugate the entire human race, you’re not alone. But instead of sitting back and waiting for the robot rebellion, two leaders in AI are teaming up to tackle the problem of creating smart computer programs that won’t eventually try and take over.

Google DeepMind and Open AI, a lab partially funded by Elon Musk, released a research article outlining a new method of machine learning. It actually takes its cues from humans when it comes to learning new tasks. This could be safer than allowing an AI to figure out how to solve a problem on its own, which has the potential to introduce unwelcome surprises.

The main problem that the research tackled was when an AI discovers the most efficient way to achieve maximum rewards is to cheat — the equivalent of shoving everything on the floor of your room into a closet and declaring it “clean.” Technically, the room itself is clean, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen. Machines are able to find these workarounds and exploit them in any given problem.

The issue is with the reward system, and that’s where the two groups focused their efforts. Rather than crafting an overly complex reward system that machines can cut through, the teams used human input to reward the AI. When the AI solved a problem the way trainers wanted to, it got positive feedback. Using this method, the AI was able to learn play simple video games.

While this is an encouraging breakthrough, it’s not widely applicable: This type of human feedback is much too time consuming. But through collaborations like this, it’s possible that we can control and direct the development of AI and prevent machines from eventually becoming smart enough to destroy us all.

Via: Wired

Source: arXiv