Get Google’s own contacts app on any Android phone

Until now, the only normal way to get Google’s official, dedicated Android contacts app was to pick up a Pixel, Nexus or Android One phone. Many third-party apps could fill in the gaps, but it wasn’t what Google had planned. However, you no longer have to turn to alternatives. Google has released Contacts on the Play Store for any device running Android 5.0 Lollipop or newer. If you’re no fan of the contacts interface on your Galaxy S8, you can see how Google handles it instead.

The software is mainly helpful for its tight integration. It’s potentially ideal if you have multiple Google accounts, since it’s easy to switch between them. Contacts likewise gives you a consistent interface between your phone and the web, and it ties closely into third-party apps like Facebook. The most recent version has also added automatic suggestions for contact info and can merge duplicates. There’s enough here that it might be worth giving Google’s approach a try, even if it’s just to confirm that you prefer another app.

Via: Android Police, 9to5Google

Source: Google Play

Four people arrested in India for leaking latest ‘Game of Thrones’ episode

HBO’s Game of Thrones has suffered a couple of leaks lately, with episodes of the hit show released to the internet before their scheduled air date. According to a new report at AFP News, however, four individuals in India have been arrested, though not for the most recent hack, according to Entertainment Weekly. Deputy Commissioner of Police Akbar Pathan told AFP that the arrest was for “unauthorized publication of the fourth episode from season seven.”

The four people will be detained until August 21st, said Pathan, under investigation for “criminal breach of trust and computer-related offenses.” The case was filed by a Mumbai-based company that stores and processes the HBO shows for an app; the accused were company employees who had access to the files. We’ve reached out to HBO for comment on this matter and will update the post when we hear back.

Via: Entertainment Weekly

Source: AFP News

Softlab transforms ’empty’ space with light and mirrors

Recently, Engadget visited The Lab, HP’s trippy art exhibition incongruously placed in the middle of the Panorama Music Festival in NYC. It proved surprisingly popular among festival-goers thanks to the visual and auditory sensory experiences (and possibly because illegal substances were involved). One in particular stood out from a technological and artistic point of view, however: “Volume,” an installation by NYC’s SOFTLab.

The installation (below) is made up of 100 mirrored panels that move individually through custom servos, tracking viewers as they move around them via a depth camera array. “Using a weighted average of the various people being tracked, the mirrors rotate to face the nearest person,” SOFTLab explains. Those mirrors reflect only the light and the viewers, thanks to the sparse setting around them.

Meanwhile, LEDs controlled by microphones move the mirror panels up and down based on the ambient sound coming from around the installation. The overall effect is of light pulsing and swarming back and forth, with mirrors reflecting the spectators in weird slices, all set to appropriately spacey music.

The whole thing is controlled by a computer with a visual interface depicting the mirrors that can be rotated in 3D. It can be tweaked for greater intensity and the number of exhibition viewers. (For more on how the exhibit was done technically, check out the making-of video.)

Like the other Panorama installations, Volume was designed to invoke “whoa” reactions from the viewers and present good selfie opportunities. However, you can read more into it if you’re into techie art. “The installation was inspired by the ability of light and sound to form space through reflection and their dependence on atmosphere,” SOFTLab points out. In other words, it’s meant to make us think a bit more about space that we normally consider empty.

The designers aim to show that it’s a good thing it’s not empty. “Small changes in this volume of transparent material allows light and sound to move through space,” it notes. “The mirrors in our installation represent these particles acting in harmony to challenge and enhance what we see.”

To look at it another way, the exhibition is showing that there’s often more behind things than what you can see. By tracking your movement and sounds, and responding dramatically in kind, “Volume” illustrates neatly that the shallow way we often perceive things and people can completely change how they behave in return.

Via: Design Boom

Source: Softlab

Google is reportedly testing a long overdue UI update for Calendar

Google Calendar might finally be getting a much needed update. The Next Web is reporting that some users’ Calendars have a whole new user interface that’s seemingly based on Google’s Material Design language. Some of those with access to the redesigned desktop version have been posting to Reddit, providing screenshots of the UI and information about its functionality.

Google launched Material Design in 2014 and has been using it as the basis for a number of updates across its product line including YouTube, Chrome, Search and Inbox. It’s sort of surprising that it has taken this long for Material Design to reach Calendar, but the images from Reddit users show a cleaner, more appealing design that brings Calendar in line with other Google sites and apps.

It’s unclear when Google plans to roll out the new Calendar to everyone, but we’ve reached out to the company for more information. We’ll update this post when we have more.

Source: The Next Web

Google cancels neo-Nazi site’s registration in a matter of hours

If the white supremacists at Daily Stormer thought they were going to get a warm reception from other web service providers after GoDaddy gave them the boot, they were clearly mistaken. Google says it’s cancelling the neo-Nazi website’s domain registration a mere 3 hours after it signed up. A Google spokesperson tells us that DS was “violating our terms of service.” The domain is still listed as registered with Google as of this writing, but it’s likely going to take some time before the change is reflected in public databases.

Google isn’t publicly elaborating on why it’s pulling the plug, but GoDaddy said it dropped the registration after DS posted an article attacking the character of Heather Heyer, the anti-racism protester murdered when a white supremacist rammed demonstrators with his car. The piece wasn’t shy about condoning the attack, and GoDaddy argued that the site could incite more attacks as a result. Google undoubtedly feels the same way — it doesn’t want to be associated with a site that’s effectively encouraging murder.

It’s unclear where the site will try to register next, although it’s safe to say that any major domain registration service is going to balk at the idea from now on. However, the incident does highlight one of the pitfalls of automated domain transfers like Google’s, which can switch a site over in a matter of minutes. They’re convenient for the vast majority of users, but they can be problematic when egregious offenders transfer domains with little warning.

Source: Reuters (CNBC)

UK cybersecurity researcher pleads not guilty to malware charges

Marcus Hutchins, the British cyber security researcher who won attention for helping to halt the spread of the WannaCry malware program earlier this year, has just entered a plea of not guilty for a set of unrelated charges. Hutchins was arrested by the FBI at the Def Con security conference in Las Vegas and was due for arraignment in a Milwaukee court last Friday. The arraignment was postponed until Monday, August 14th, which is when Hutchins entered his plea.

According to Reuters, US prosecutors have charged Hutchins and an unnamed co-defendant for advertising, distributing and profiting from malware code, “Kronos,” that would let attackers access bank accounts and credit cards from people who downloaded it from an email attachment. While the court case is still pending, the prosecutors claim that Hutchins has already admitted to writing the malware. The 23-year old’s lawyer told Reuters that Hutchins is a “brilliant young man and a hero” and that he will “vigorously defend himself against these charges, and when the evidence comes to light, we are confident he will be fully vindicated.”

Source: Reuters

Alleged Microsoft memo says Surface reliability issues are fixed

Last week, Consumer Reports removed its “recommended” rating from four of Microsoft’s Surface laptops and tablets, citing reliability concerns: 25 percent of the 90,000 users they surveyed reported freezing and shutdowns in the first couple years of device use. The tech giant took issue with the publication’s data and reported significantly lower failure rates. But a company VP allegedly sent an internal memo picking apart which device failures tipped the scales and caused Consumer Reports to slam the whole Surface family.

In a post on his site Thurrott, tech journalist Paul Thurrott described the memo. Written by Microsoft vice president Panos Panay, it reaffirmed that all current Surface devices enjoy low failure rates and high customer satisfaction. However, two devices released concurrently in 2015, the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, had significant return rates soon after they launched (as seen in the graph below). Irate consumers complaining about these products from this time frame might have been disproportionately represented in Consumer Reports’ survey data, Panay suggested.

Why the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book had such high “failure” rates is a story unto itself: Competing narratives from inside sources blame either Intel’s then-new Skylake generation of chips that Microsoft loaded into those devices, or that the tech company just flubbed when creating custom drivers and settings for its hybrid devices, Thurrott recalled.

Commitments to improve later devices paid off, Panay continued in the memo, which is reflected in the lower return rates for more recent Surface devices. Across the whole product family, Surfaces currently have less than one percent of “incidents per unit.” Panay also took issue with what Consumer Reports’ considers a ‘failure:’ Frozen screens or unresponsive touch are minor incidents that the user can easily fix.

Whether they should have to or not apparently didn’t reflect the other metric Panay brought up: That Surface products beat competing devices with consistently-higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS), a version of customer satisfaction measuring whether consumers would recommend others buy the same model. But that isn’t the same as reliability, which is what Consumer Reports was originally surveying, Thurrott points out.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft to confirm the existence of this memo as it’s described and will report when we hear back. But Thurrott has a good history of uncovering information ahead of time, like when he revealed that Microsoft’s Hololens wouldn’t be released ahead of 2019.

Source: Thurrott

LG’s V30 will unlock when it recognizes your face or voice

Until your phone or tablet is set up just the way you want it, a brand new device feels kind of foreign. With the V30, LG is giving you more options for making the phone your own. You can match haptic feedback to the ringtone of your choosing, for starters. Customization applies to security as well, with a handful of ways to make sure you’re the only one unlocking your phone. Its face recognition apparently works “instantaneously” without the need to turn the screen on first. More than that, you can set a voice password as well. Biometric security!

To take advantage of the handset’s 18:9 OLED display, you can even adjust the Floating Bar (or push it out of the way entirely). Essentially, it offers a place to put your most used apps and widgets.

That’s not to mention all the tricks the phone’s camera is capable of with its f/1.6 glass lens. From the manual shooting mode, you can access Graphy, a sort of photo editing suite that grants access to editing presets designed by pro photographers. Want to make a quick GIF of your dog licking its nose? That’s doable too.

Those interested in more info won’t have too much longer to wait — the LG V30 will be formally revealed August 31st.

Netflix snags an Alan Arkin, Michael Douglas comedy series

Netflix may have lost Disney, but it has been bringing in a ton of big names the past couple of weeks. The latest project to be announced is a comedy series starring Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin. Entitled The Kominsky Method, the series will be written and produced by Big Bang Theory co-creator Chuck Lorre.

Douglas — who hasn’t had a major TV role since the 1970s — plays an acting coach who once had a little whiff of acting success when he was a younger man. Arkin’s character is his friend and agent.

Other notable Netflix pulls of late include an anthology series about the American West from the Coen brothers, a new show from David Letterman, Mark Millar’s comics publishing house and a fantasy cartoon from Matt Groening. Netflix also just signed Shonda Rhimes and her Shondaland empire.

There’s no word yet on when we can expect to watch The Kominsky Method, but for those hankering for some Chuck Lorre, his new Netflix series with Kathy Bates premieres on August 25th.

Source: Variety

Swift Creator and Former Apple Engineer Chris Lattner Joins Google’s AI Team

Chris Lattner, once responsible for leading the teams behind Xcode and Swift, made headlines earlier this year when he left Apple to work at Tesla.

At the time, Lattner told MacRumors the opportunity to work on Tesla’s self-driving project with the Tesla Autopilot team was “irresistible.” Lattner lasted just six months at Tesla, however, and left the company in June.

“Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla and we’ve decided to make a change,” the company told The Wall Street Journal after Lattner exited. Lattner went on to announce on Twitter that he was seeking companies interested in a “seasoned engineering leader,” which has apparently led to a new role at Google.

Lattner today announced that he has joined the Google Brain team to work on artificial intelligence. Google Brain is Google’s research unit, and Lattner is expected to work on TensorFlow, Google’s open-source machine learning software.

Tags: Google, Swift
Discuss this article in our forums