WNBA teams make their console debut in ‘NBA Live 18’

It looks like EA is finally getting the idea that women play sports and that video game fans want to see them in their sports titles. Since the video game company has women’s soccer teams in soccer sim FIFA, it’s now set to add WNBA teams and players to its NBA Live franchise, the latest of which launches on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in September. This is the first time the official WNBA roster will appear in a video game.

NBA Live 18 will include WNBA Play Now, which lets you use official female teams and players in games. You won’t be able to mix them in with the NBA players, however. According to EA, the teams and player skills have been balanced to “reflect the unique playstyle of the league and skills of its players.” The development team at EA Tiburon scanned the heads of star WNBA athletes like Maya Moore, Brittney Griner, Diana Taurasi, Tina Charles, Sylvia Fowles, Alisha Gray, Chelsea Gray, Jonquel Jones, and Alyssa Thomas. Kelsey Plum, the 2017 WNBA Draft first overall pick, did some motion capture sessions, as well.

“We are extremely proud to partner with the WNBA and the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) on this groundbreaking occasion,” said EA’s Sean O’Brien in a statement. “The WNBA is home to some of the most incredible athletes on the planet, and we’ve been working hard to integrate them into our game in an authentic and meaningful way. This is only a taste of what we have in store, and look forward to working with the league on more great integrations in the franchise in the future.”

Source: EA Sports

Asus ZenFone AR is available now on Verizon for $648 (updated)

Back at CES, we were impressed with Asus’ new smartphone, the ZenFone AR, but it wasn’t clear exactly how much it would be. Now, the Verizon-exclusive smartphone is available now and it costs $648, or if you want to go the installment route, qualified buyers can pay in installments of $27 per month. The product page says the phone is only available online, but Verizon confirmed to Engadget that it’s available in retail stores as well.

The ZenFone AR is the first phone to support both Tango, which is Google’s 3D mapping tech to support AR, and Daydream VR. This combination will provide a mix of both AR and VR; while we didn’t get to try it out at CES, it’s very intriguing. There’s a lot of tech packed into this slim and lightweight package. Other specs include 128GB of RAM, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 821 processor, three camera sensors, a 5.7-inch AMOLED display and a 5,000 mAh battery.

Apple’s been very interested in AR lately, as the recent launch of ARKit makes clear. They want to allow developers easy access to tools that add digital objects to the real world (think Pokemon Go). ARKit will supposedly be the largest AR platform in the world, as it will be available on all iPads and iPhones in iOS 11. It’s likely no coincidence, then, that the ZenFone AR, which supports competitor Google Tango, is launching right now.

The Verge reports that the ZenFone AR will also be available in the US unlocked for $599. We’ve reached out to Asus for confirmation and will update this post if we hear back.

Update: The post originally states the phone was up for pre-order at Verizon. The carrier confirmed the ZenFone AR is now available both in-store and online with the pricing options listed above. This post has been updated to reflect that clarification.

Via: The Verge, 9to5Google

Source: Verizon

Chevy Bolt outlasts Tesla’s Model S in Consumer Reports range test

Consumer Reports just published the results of its range test of the Chevrolet Bolt electric car and came up with some surprising results. While the Bolt is rated for 238 miles of driving by the EPA, the car exceeded that in the Consumer Reports test, squeezing out 12 more miles for a total of 250. That means the Bolt officially beats Tesla’s Model S, at least in this particular test. When CR tested the Model S 75D, it got 235 miles, compared to the EPA estimate of 259.

What’s strange about this test isn’t that the Model S underperformed compared to the EPA estimate — the EPA range or milage is typically under the most ideal conditions that are pretty near impossible to recreate in real life driving. Regardless of that fact, Chevy’s Bolt actually exceeded the EPA estimate in the Consumer Reports test. CR notes that its tests primarily consist of driving at 65MPH on the highway with the heating and cooling system shut off, but there are also periods of “mixed driving” as well.

Despite the Bolt’s range victory, CR says that it only scores number two on its list of the top electric vehicles. The Model S still holds the top slot, but it’s a car that costs nearly twice as much as the Bolt. And while we don’t think that CR did anything sneaky or underhanded in its Bolt test, it’s worth noting that the publication has clashed a bit with Tesla recently. A change in the CR ranking for the Model S earlier this year knocked it from the top luxury car down to third place. The drop came after Tesla failed to deliver its automatic emergency braking feature that was due by the end of 2016 — as such, CR downgraded its safety rating. For Tesla’s part, the company said it would be irresponsible to rush a safety feature out before it was ready.

We’ve reached out to Tesla for comment on this latest report and will update with any additional information we learn.

Source: Consumer Reports

A New York library card is your ticket to stream thousands of movies

Libraries have long let users check out DVDs and Blu-ray discs, but that’s starting to feel a bit archaic thanks to Netflix, Hulu and all the rest. Fortunately for those who don’t even have a disc player anymore, some libraries are getting into the streaming gaming. As reported by Gothamist, the New York Public Library is getting ready to give citizens access to Kanopy, a streaming service originally started to let university students access its library of films. Currently, Kanopy has deals with more than 3,000 colleges and universities, and the company has been making partnerships with public libraries as well.

Starting this Friday, the New York Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library systems will both have access to the Kanopy collection, which notably includes every movie in the Criterion Collection. You’ll need to visit a library branch to get a “full access” library card, but once you do you’ll have access to the 30,000 films that Kanopy offers. Beyond the Criterion Collection, Kanopy also has content from The Great Courses, PBS, the BBC, First Run and a number of other providers. Given Kanopy’s background, there’s a focus on documentary and educational content, but there should be all types of films available — there’s probably just not as many current blockbusters as you’ll find on other services.

Users will be able to view up to 10 movies per month and have three days to finish watching them once they start. Kanopy has iOS, Android and Roku apps and supports Airplay if you want to watch movies on Apple TV.

This move into New York City follows Kanopy’s launch in Los Angeles and Grand Rapids earlier this year. We’ve reached out to Kanopy to see what other public libraries they operate in and will update this post if we find out more. But in the meantime, NYC residents should make sure they have their library cards ready to go.

Source: Gothamist

iOS 11 camera features may include scene recognition

Smartphones may have effectively killed off dedicated point-and-shoot cameras, but Apple is looking to them for inspiration with iOS 11. Developers have dug through beta firmware for the HomePod, and tucked inside the code for Apple’s smart speaker, there are hints that the next version of its mobile OS will feature something called “SmartCam.”

iOS 11 (or the next iPhone) will have something called SmartCam. It will tune camera settings based on the scene it detects pic.twitter.com/7duyvh5Ecj

— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) August 2, 2017

If you’ve ever used a point-and-shoot camera, the feature should sound pretty familiar: different scene modes and photo settings depending on what you’re shooting. So, one each for fireworks, foliage, pets, skies, snow, sports and others, as SlashGear notes. There’s even one for documents.

The “smart” in its name suggests that maybe machine learning will play a role here as well, potentially analyzing the scene for you and picking the best settings. This might not use machine learning to improve photography a la what Google does with the Pixel, but it could make Apple’s woefully basic camera app a little more full featured.

Whether this will be exclusive to Apple’s next round of mobile hardware — whenever it’s announced — or if it’ll apply to legacy handsets too is hard to tell.

Via: SlashGear

Source: Guilherme Rambo (Twitter)

Uber leased recalled cars to drivers in Singapore

Uber’s troubles just keep on coming. A new report in The Wall Street Journal today says that the ride-sharing company knowingly leased recalled Honda Vezel sport-utility vehicles to Uber drivers. According to the Journal, Uber managers in the region were aware of the recall, but still bought and leased more than 1,000 of the Vezels to drivers in Singapore. This past January, says the report, one of the leased Vezels caught fire, melted the interior and cracked a football-sized hole in the windshield, all due to the same recalled electrical part.

The report says that according to both emails and former Uber managers in Asia, San Francisco-based Uber executives were briefed on the issue and possible response plan. The idea was to deactivate the faulty devices, but leave the cars on the road in Singapore while waiting for replacement parts, after approval from authorities and advice from car-repair experts.

An Uber spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal: “we took swift action to fix the problem, in close coordination with Singapore’s Land Transport Authority as well as technical experts. But we acknowledge we could have done more—and we have done so.” Whether executives in San Francisco knew of the Vezel safety recall before the car fire is unclear from the emails. We’ve reached out to Uber for comment and will update this post when we hear back.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Google’s Play Store will boost rankings of high quality apps

With thousands of apps added every day, Google’s Play Store is bloated with poor-quality software. We’re not just talking about lame game knockoffs — lots of the worst are badly-coded monstrosities that crash often and drain your battery. To keep them off the top of app lists, Google has overhauled its search and discovery algorithms to take quality into account and downrank bad apples into oblivion.

While these changes should improve the Play Store experience for all, it’ll likely take a bit for app creators to understand how Google’s weighing quality. In a blog post announcing the change, the search giant recommended developers pay close attention to the Android vitals page and pre-launch reports before pushing out updates. Of course, if you miss any bugs, user reviews will certainly let you know.

We’ll see how good a job algorithms do burying bad apps, but at least Google’s trying to make getting apps from the Play Store a less painful experience, like it’s done with new scanning tools that identify malware-installing “rogue apps.”

Source: Android Developers Blog

Facebook translations are now entirely powered by AI

Facebook has been working on changing how it translates text in posts and comments and today it announced that its transition is complete. It means that translations should be quite a bit more accurate going forward.

Previously, Facebook was using phrase-based machine translation models, which break down sentences into words or phrases, limiting how they can go about translating a full sentence. These sorts of models’ shortcomings were particularly evident when translating between languages with really different sentence structures. Now, however, the site is using neural networks to power its translations, which can take into account full sentences as well as their context, generating much more accurate translations. The example Facebook provided is below. The first translation is produced by a phrase-based system while the second is the product of a neural network.

The neural nets can also handle unknown words better than other systems and can generate translations more quickly. The advantages afforded by neural networks have led Google and Microsoft to adopt them for their translations as well.

Facebook said in a statement, “Completing the transition from phrase-based to neural machine translation is a milestone on our path to providing Facebook experiences to everyone in their preferred language. We will continue to push the boundaries of neural machine translation technology, with the aim of providing humanlike translations to everyone on Facebook.”

Source: Facebook

Michelle Carter gets 15 months in prison in texting suicide case

Back in June, a Massachusetts Juvenile Court found Michelle Carter guilty of manslaughter for urging her then-boyfriend to kill himself back in 2014. Today, her sentence came down: Of the maximum 20-year prison sentence she faced, Carter will serve 15 months behind bars, with the remainder of the 2.5-year sentence suspended. She will also get five years probation. Carter will remain free as her appeal to the conviction is still pending.

The compromise decision followed the defense’s arguments that Carter was suffering mental illness when she sent text messages to her boyfriend for two weeks telling him to take his own life. That didn’t sway the court. According to the BBC, the presiding Judge Lawrence Moniz said he did not find that her “age or level of maturity or even her mental illness have any significant impact on her actions”.

Because there is no Massachusetts law criminalizing the act of telling someone to kill themselves, this decision could set legal precedent — which would have ramifications for free speech. It’s the latest high-profile case to address whether digital messages could be considered influential in wrongful death cases; According to Massachusetts law, manslaughter is legally defined as “an unlawful killing that was unintentionally caused as the result of the defendant’s wanton or reckless conduct.” While there are plenty of cyberbullying statutes on the books, this sentence could be the first of many that punish folks whose digital harassment leads to death.

Source: The BBC

Bestek’s 8-port surge protector is great for team projects – not so great for space-saving

Hello again, Android Guys. Today I’ll be giving you a peek at Bestek’s massive 8 port surge protector – which I like to think of as a tower, given its unique, upright positioning.

Upon opening this beast, the first thing that catches your attention is the heft; this thing is huge, let me tell you. If you’re looking for a power strip to consolidate all your power strips into one neat, tucked away place, this is not your item. What it does well, however, is provide a central location to easily plug in and remove devices as needed. It’s an ideal power source for group projects, for get-togethers, or for work meetings.

Which is, to say, this is a purely practical piece of hardware. It won’t help you solve your cord tangling issues, nor will it conceal those tangles – it will, however, provide 8 AC (1500J) ports and 6 USB ports (rated at 2.4A each, 8A total) to power as many devices as you could possibly want to power within easy reach atop a table.

There are a couple fairly unique features in this device that you won’t find on your average $10 surge protector. First, each of the eight individual AC outlets has a safety “hatch” that prevents foreign objects from being stuck in them.  Additionally, each port has an LED that shows the status of the port. Normally, a power strip has a switch that lets you turn the ports off or on without unplugging the strip. This device, however, has two switches – one for the top row, and one for the bottom row of ports.

Sadly, while one of the pictures of the unit shows a phone sitting on top of the tower charging without any cables connected to it, the tower does not support wireless charging – but that would have been so damned cool, right?

At $30 (with the coupon code below) it’s a bit pricier than many of us would prefer to spend on a surge protector, but the durability, number of ports, and additional features on Bestek’s tower make it well worth the extra peace of mind.

Use Discount Code BA6F993J to get 25% off this piece on Amazon!

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The Beast comes in an unassuming box that doesn’t quite prepare you for what lies within.

A good look at the safety hatch and LEDs.

Buttons can toggle the upper and lower tiers independently.

Good, solid cable with Bestek-branded Velcro tie.

Eight AC Ports. Six USB Ports.

That’s a lot of ports.

Organize that mess and stop tripping over cables.