The Best 360 Roller coaster Videos

Scream if you want to go faster!

VR delivers tons of great experiences from the comfort of your office chair. Some of the most fun you can have is riding a roller coaster without actually strapping yourself into a contraption meant to hurl you through turns at seventy miles an hour. There are plenty of videos out there that will let you ride a roller coaster in VR, but they definitely are not all made equally. If you want the experience, but not the lines, or the actual feeling of being on a coaster, then there are some great videos that recreate what it feels like.

That’s why we’ve scoured the web to find the best 360 rollercoaster videos on the web and collected them for you here!

[Read more at VRHeads](https://www.vrheads.com/best-360-rollercoaster-videos(.cta.large

Eyes without a face [#acpodcast]

This week, Daniel Bader, Alex Dobie, and Jerry Hildenbrand dissect the technology in Apple’s new iPhone X for a deep dive into wireless charging, facial recognition, and the impact they have the entire smartphone industry. Additionally, LG’s V30 continues to generate buzz in the market while the Galaxy Note 8 is now shipping, and the Pixel 2 is officially set for an October 4th announcement. The crew also talk about Andy Rubin, Vic Gundotra, computational photography, and more!

Show Notes and Links:

• LG V30 initial review
• Where to buy the Galaxy Note 8
• Fact-checking the iPhone X event
• iPhone X and iPhone 8 impressions from an Android user
• Take it from a Note 8 user: Temper your iPhone X Face ID expectation
• It’s official: the Pixel 2 is coming October 4

Podcast MP3 URL: http://traffic.libsyn.com/androidcentral/androidcentral352.mp3

Galaxy Note 8 region locking, explained

Picking up an unlocked Note 8 in Europe today? Here’s what that ominous ‘European SIM card only’ sticker means.

If you’re picking up a shiny new, unlocked Samsung Galaxy Note 8 in Europe today, you’ll notice a sticker sealing the box. We’ve been here before with countless other Samsung flagships, and once again, the Note 8, as sold unlocked in Europe, is region-locked out of the box.

But it’s only a temporary situation — and it’s not as huge a deal as you might think.

The sticker on the Euro Galaxy Note 8 box spells out exactly which countries’ SIM cards can be used to activate the phone — essentially any EU and EEA countries, and a handful of other territories: Switzerland, Macedonia, Monaco, Montenegro, San Marino, Serbia and Vatican City.

As we’ve seen with earlier models, the Note 8’s region lock is temporary, and most will disable it through normal use of the phone.

To activate your unlocked Galaxy Note 8 for use with SIMs outside these countries, you’ll need to accumulate five minutes worth of phone calls on the phone with a “European” SIM — any SIM from the countries above. It doesn’t have to be a single phone call, just five minutes total. And once you’ve “activated” the phone, it stays that way even after a factory reset.

The sticker on the dual-SIM Note 8 doesn’t specify which SIM slot the calls need to be made on, sugesting the five minute total apples across both slots for dual-SIM folks. (By the same token, the SIM lock should also apply to both slots.)

So in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a massive inconvenience for regular Note 8 buyers, who’ll almost certainly hit the five minute mark before they’re inclined to travel anywhere outside Europe. The real intention here is to scupper gray importers looking to sell European Note 8s further afield. Samsung, like any large multinational electronics manufacturer, wants phones to be sold where they’re covered by warranties, and where it can easily offer localized customer support.

Sure, individual importers can always open and activate region-locked Note 8s, but it’s an additional barrier to entry which prevents mass distribution of Samsung phones outside of their intended area.

And for anyone picking up a Note 8 and then immediately hopping on a plane, just be sure to hit that five-minute mark before you go.

Samsung Galaxy Note 8

• Galaxy Note 8 review
• Complete Galaxy Note 8 specs
• Galaxy Note 8 vs. Galaxy Note 5
• Which Note 8 color is best?
• Join our Galaxy Note 8 forums

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‘Destiny 2’ studio explains how a hate symbol made it into the game

Earlier this week, Destiny 2 developer Bungie announced that it had become aware of some armor in the game that looked a lot like a symbol used by white supremacists. The company apologized, noted that the symbols didn’t represent its values and said the offending armor would be removed.

2/2 Our deepest apologies. This does NOT represent our values, and we are working quickly to correct this. We renounce hate in all forms.

— Bungie (@Bungie) September 12, 2017

On Bungie’s website, the company has now offered a bit of explanation as to how the symbol was worked into the armor design and what it’s now doing to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. As for how it happened, Bungie says that graphic designers often draw from real world art, iconography and other design elements. In this case, a question was raised by Bungie staff as to whether the team was ok with the design looking similar to the “original, innocuous ‘kek’ internet meme” but its similarities with the Kekistan flag — a hate symbol — weren’t noticed or discussed. “The more contemporary, vile derivation that has been repurposed by hate groups was not surfaced through this process, and therefore, the armor was approved for ship,” said Bungie in a post.

Bungie has removed the symbols from the armor in question and will be removing them from the UI icon and preview screens next week. The company says it’s also looking into how it can more thoroughly vet content in the future. “We aren’t asking you for the benefit of the doubt. We know we are judged by our actions,” it said.

Via: Waypoint

Source: Bungie

Ford invests in Michigan’s autonomous car testing grounds

Ford might not be the first name that comes to mind when you think of autonomous vehicles (unless you really like Domino’s pizza), but that doesn’t mean the automaker is sitting by while everyone else is making leaps and bounds in the space. The company just announced that it’s making a $5 million investment in the American Center for Mobility. “This is an investment in the safe, rapid testing and deployment of transformative technology that will help improve peoples’ lives,” Ford’s CTO Ken Washington said in a press release (PDF).

The money puts Ford in the same company as AT&T, Toyota Motor North America and Toyota Research Institute as a founder of the 500 acre Willow Run autonomous vehicle testing campus located outside of Detroit in Ypsilanti Township. Willow Run’s first phase is scheduled to open this December. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder called the investment a show of faith from Ford to the world’s automotive capital. “As the convergence between the technological and manufacturing sectors continues to grow, it is very encouraging to see great Michigan companies like Ford leading the way toward our future,” he said in the same release.

The Wolverine State is making a comeback in terms of manufacturing, and a chunk of it is tied directly to the future of mobility. LG recently announced it will open a factory outside of Detroit to manufacture EV parts, for example, and GM announced late last year that it would begin building and testing self-driving cars near Detroit as well.

On the other side of the state in Holland, LG Chem makes batteries for EVs and hybrids. Tesla’s first acquisition was a tool and die shop in Grand Rapids, where it makes automotive stamping parts.

Michigan went through a dark period following the Great Recession and auto industry meltdown (Ford proudly didn’t take any bailout money), and is returning to its roots to help bring the state out of its decade-plus run of bad luck.

Given its manufacturing infrastructure, culture of innovation and long history of marrying software with hardware — something Silicon Valley is only catching up to just now — investments like can only help Michigan rise from the ashes.

Source: Ford

How Bodega typifies Silicon Valley’s cultural ignorance

On Wednesday a story about two ex-Google employees receiving an obscene amount of money for a bad idea hit social media and was met with a level of outrage you could feel through the screen. If you’re online in any way whatsoever, you likely know I’m talking about Bodega.

The excellent article, Two Ex-Googlers Want To Make Bodegas And Mom-And-Pop Corner Stores Obsolete, hit several raw nerves with a wide range of people.

This fury is so crystallized because “Bodega” — an overfunded, probably doomed, glorified vending machine startup positioned as a bodega killer — stands for everything Silicon Valley represents to us. Whereas in reality, the very concept of a bodega stands for the absolute opposite of Silicon Valley.

It’s almost like someone said “Siri, show me why everyone hates and fears the things wearing human suits known as techies.”

Piles of money for trivial garbage

Bodega isn’t just an offensive idea, it’s an idea so bad and obviously worthless it’s maddening. Part of the visceral backlash was directed at the bourgeois wastefulness of the whole startup ecosystem, of which we are all angrily exhausted.

People who shop at the same Bay Area corner stores that Bodega wants to eliminate, like me, aren’t worried about any problem the startup wants to solve. We’re fretting about paying rent, affording health insurance, and the extreme gap between Bay Area’s rich and poor created by local tech companies that’s making the homeless problem a third world nightmare in our streets. A world in which Bodega gets a truckload of cash to almost literally burn right before our eyes.

Fast Company informs us,

About a year ago, McDonald and Rajan secured funding from notable investors to launch the concept, including Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital, Kirsten Green at Forerunner Ventures, and Hunter Walk at Homebrew. They also secured angel investment from senior executives at Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and Google.

According to TechCrunch, the startup’s first financing round was a cool $2.5 million.

No, instead of all the money that could help the Bay Area’s crushing homeless problem (and serve as models for other cities if done well), or help other worthy tech causes like Hack The Hood, we get Silicon Valley’s “best and brightest” reinventing the vending machine in the most dystopian, community-destroying way imaginable.

You can almost see the pitch meeting. One VC remarks to another, “You think that’s crazy? Hold my Juicero.”

Replacing community with soulless automation

Deeper outrage was directed at the hubris, ignorance, and privilege it takes to want to make a business out of replacing the cornerstones of community known on the East Coast and parts of Los Angeles as bodegas.

The idea of the Bodega product is to remove human contact from the neighborhood shopping equation, to do away with the actual bodega. “The vision here is much bigger than the box itself,” McDonald told Fast Company. “Eventually, centralized shopping locations won’t be necessary, because there will be 100,000 Bodegas spread out, with one always 100 feet away from you.”

Right after the Fast Company article came out, the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development in New York issued a statement. “The awful irony of naming the company ‘Bodega’ after the very brick and mortar institutions they aim to displace, to say nothing about the cat their logo is based on that will similarly be displaced, is offensive, utterly misguided, and frankly disrespectful to New Yorkers,” it wrote.

Until the backlash hit, Bodega seemed fine with everything written about it killing corner stores and appropriating the bodega name. The Fast Company article that got all the attention was a really well-done piece and had confronted CEO and co-founder Paul McDonald. In it, Elizabeth Segran wrote, “I asked McDonald point-blank about whether he’s worried that the name Bodega might come off as culturally insensitive. Not really.” He told her in response, “I’m not particularly concerned about it.”

When it became clear that replacing bodegas with a box wasn’t a great selling point — nor was naming the company after the thing it seemed keen to undercut — McDonald shot out a backpedaling apology.

In contrast to his brush off about the issue of co-opting “bodega” to Fast Company, McDonald wrote:

When we first came up with the idea to call the company Bodega we recognized that there was a risk of it being interpreted as misappropriation. We did some homework — speaking to New Yorkers, branding people, and even running some survey work asking about the name and any potential offense it might cause. But it’s clear that we may not have been asking the right questions of the right people.

Regarding the headlines echoing McDonald’s quote about Bodega’s aim to eliminate the necessity of stores he wrote, “Challenging the urban corner store is not and has never been our goal.”

Then the clicks and whirrs of a robot that had only learned about corner stores from a machine learning algorithm kicked in as McDonald continued:

Corner stores have been fixtures of their neighborhoods for generations. They stock thousands of items, far more than we could ever fit on a few shelves. Their owners know what products to carry and in many cases who buys what. And they’re run by people who in addition to selling everything from toilet paper to milk also offer an integral human connection to their patrons that our automated storefronts never will.

Can you imagine handing your bank details to these clowns? Or trusting them to make the right decisions about audits and security, or your home address and third parties, or … any Google, Facebook, Uber — any major company’s products — that affect millions of users every day?

Maybe there was a point in time when we could, but I don’t remember it. Every day seems to bring a new terrifying (and insulting) reason to distrust Silicon Valley’s companies and eager little startups. Which is probably because, like with Bodega, they’re all founded, operated, funded, and secured by the same kinds of people.

That wacky “integral human connection”

I think we’re morbidly fascinated with who the people behind these tech companies are, the ones making huge decisions about our lives (and our security and privacy). They create and gatekeep the technologies that arbitrate our relationships and our communities. These are the people who are shaping our future, and yet we end up with over-engineered, pricey juice presses and vending machines.

Paul McDonald served as a product manager at Google for 13 years. His partner Ashwath Rajan was an associate product manager at the company for just over a year. In case you’re not sure what that means, a Google Product Manager shepherds to completion new products and features that impact the lives of millions of users every day.

McDonald and Rajan have been testing out their Bodega Boxes at 30 locations around the Bay Area since late last year, placing the bespoke toilet paper vending machines in what me must assume are crime-free (read: upper class) apartment lobbies and offices.

Bodega is not unique in any way. Remember SceneTap, the facial recognition startup for telling its app’s users how many women were in a bar at any given time? They tried to launch in San Francisco. To their surprise, but no one else’s, the backlash was huge.

I can’t imagine a solution for the Bodega problem, mostly because of the fact that it exists at all.

Here in the Bay Area, where these ex-Googlers got their pedigrees to formulate and pitch their startup, we don’t actually call them bodegas. We call them “corner stores.” This little detail is even more conspicuous when you consider that Paul McDonald says he has not lived in New York.

Which is why even just the startup’s name “Bodega” told us locals and natives — the involuntary first-wave recipients of Silicon Valley’s fucked up experiments with our lives — all we needed to know.

Images: Alain-Christian/Flickr (Bodega cat); Spencer Platt/Getty Images (An NYC bodega)

Google has targeted ads based on hate speech, too

Yesterday, ProPublica released a report on its investigation into the sorts of ad categories Facebook makes available to advertisers. It found that the website allowed it to target ads to users based on categories like “Jew hater” and “How to burn jews” among other antisemitic options. Today, BuzzFeed reports that Google has a similar problem.

In a comparable investigation, BuzzFeed News purchased and published an ad campaign through Google that targeted users who search with keywords like “why do jews ruin everything.” Further, when BuzzFeed reporters typed in those words into the ad-buying platform, Google suggested other phrases to use like “the evil jew” and “jewish parasites.” When the team tried phrases like “white people ruin,” Google’s suggestions included “black people destroy everything” and “black people ruin neighborhoods.” After the ads were purchased, they appeared on Google’s page when BuzzFeed staff searched for the phrases they had targeted. However, the ads that made it through only accrued 17 impressions before their keywords were disabled by Google after the company received screenshots from BuzzFeed alerting them to the ads.

Google has since disabled nearly all of the terms targeted by BuzzFeed’s ad campaign, save for “black people destroy everything,” which was still an eligible target when BuzzFeed published their post. But an eligible keyword doesn’t mean it’s an approved keyword, just that the ad targeting it is under review and has the possibility of being approved. Many of BuzzFeed’s ads weren’t approved in the end and when that was the case, Google’s message in response was, “We value diversity and respect for others, so we strive to avoid offending users with ads or promoted content that’s inappropriate for our ad network. Please remove any content that promotes hatred, intolerance, harassment, intimidation, exploitation, violence, or self-harm.”

While it appears that Google caught many of the ads targeting racist language, the fact that some got through means there’s most certainly room for improvement.

In a statement to Engadget, Google’s senior vice president of ads, Sridhar Ramaswamy, said, “Our goal is to prevent our keyword suggestions tool from making offensive suggestions, and to stop any offensive ads appearing. We have language that informs advertisers when their ads are offensive and therefore rejected. In this instance, ads didn’t run against the vast majority of these keywords, but we didn’t catch all these offensive suggestions. That’s not good enough and we’re not making excuses. We’ve already turned off these suggestions, and any ads that made it through, and will work harder to stop this from happening again.”

Images: Google / BuzzFeed News

Source: BuzzFeed

Senate bill calls for free credit freezes after Equifax breach

US Senator Elizabeth Warren and a handful of her Democratic peers have introduced a bill intended to give consumers more control over the information collected by credit-reporting agencies including Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. The Freedom From Equifax Exploitation Act is in response to a massive security breach at Equifax that compromised the personal information of 143 million people. Equifax reported the hack on September 7th, though the attack itself was live from mid-May through the end of July.

Above all, the FREE Act would allow consumers to freeze their credit at any time for free. This would prevent companies like Equifax from selling that information to other entities. The bill also expands fraud alert protections and would force Equifax to refund any fees it charged for credit freezes in the wake of the breach.

On top of the bill, Warren is spearheading an investigation into the Equifax hack and the wider credit-reporting industry. This is her wheelhouse — Warren helped establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011, following the 2007 financial crisis. In a letter to the CFPB and Federal Trade Commission today, Warren asked whether the bureau would benefit from additional authorities to properly oversee credit-reporting agencies.

The FTC is also investigating the incident itself.

Days after the Equifax breach, Democratic Senators Brian Schatz, Claire McCaskill, Richard Blumenthal, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley and Warren reintroduced the Stop Errors in Credit Use and Reporting Act, which would introduce operational standards for the credit-reporting industry and give consumers more control over their information.

Hackers were able to access Equifax’s bank of names, addresses, birth dates, social security numbers and other private information because of a flaw in the Apache Struts Web Framework that was made public in March. Equifax didn’t properly patch the loophole — the hack began two months later and was allowed to linger through July.

It isn’t just the government making moves after the Equifax incident: Credit Karma this week announced it’s added Equifax to its free credit monitoring service.

Source: Elizabeth Warren

Facebook opens a new AI research lab in Montreal

Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research team is expanding. The company announced a brand new AI lab that just opened in Montreal, which joins the network of existing labs based in Menlo Park, New York City and Paris. “The Montreal lab will house research scientists and engineers working on a wide range of ambitious AI research projects, but it will also have a special focus on reinforcement learning and dialog systems,” Facebook’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said in a post.

The lab will be helmed by Joelle Pineau, a computer science professor at McGill University interested in learning and the co-director of the university’s Reasoning and Learning Lab. Her research has focused on planning, learning and decision-making as well as human-robot interactions. She has published a number of studies on dialog systems and worked on a team that developed an intelligent robotic wheelchair.

LeCun says that, like other Facebook AI research labs, the Montreal site will engage with research communities via publications, conferences and collaborations. Facebook will also partner with McGill University as well as the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms and Université de Montréal.

“Montreal already has an existing fantastic academic AI community, an exciting ecosystem of startups, and promising government policies to encourage AI research. We are excited to become part of this larger community, and we look forward to engaging with the entire ecosystem and helping it continue to thrive,” said LeCun.

Source: Facebook

Twitter also has a problem with ads targeted towards hate speech

ProPublica found that Facebook allows ads to be targeted at users based on antisemitic keywords and BuzzFeed has reported that Google similarly allows ads to be targeted through racist and hateful phrases. So, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise at this point that it turns out Twitter is laden with similar issues.

The Daily Beast reports today that its staff was successful in launching ad campaigns on Twitter using terms like “wetback” and “Nazi” to target particular audiences. When purchasing ads, Twitter’s platform asks advertisers to select keywords that aid in helping the site place ads in front of relevant users. When Daily Beast reporters typed “wetback” into this feature, Twitter informed them that 26.3 million users might respond to that term. Similarly, it said 18.6 million accounts would probably be interested in the term “Nazi.” After confirming that their ad campaigns were successful, The Daily Beast terminated each of them.

Twitter’s ad policy notes that it prohibits the promotion of hate content and says that advertisers are responsible for their own ads. And while in its policies for keyword targeting, Twitter states that racial or ethnic origin categories can’t be included, hate speech isn’t specifically mentioned.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for a comment and we’ll update this post when we receive more information.

Source: The Daily Beast