Video: What’s new in Android 8.1 Oreo

Say hello to a new flavor of Oreo. Android 8.1 is official, and available now as a developer preview ahead of its launch in December. Being a “point” release of Android, there aren’t too many big, sweeping changes. But there’s plenty for Pixel owners in particular to get excited about.

Android 8.1 is, firstly, a big deal for the 2016 Pixels because it brings them up to date with the look and feel of Google’s latest phones. And it’s a big deal for the Pixel 2 series as well — or at least it will be, when we can demo what the Pixel Visual Core is capable of. There’s a great deal of potential around the Pixel 2’s Visual Core that could be unlocked with Android 8.1 and its AI API’s.

And what’s more, it’ll be important for upcoming phones like the Huawei Mate 10, to unlock the power of their own AI hardware.

Check out our video for a rundown of the top five features you need to know about in the very latest version of Android.

• Android 8.0 Oreo review
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Automatically record every emergency with the $38 Yi dashboard camera

Record your amazing (or terrible) driving with this dash cam!

Is this deal for me?

The Yi 1080p dashboard camera is down to $40 on Amazon with code YIDASH38. It normally sells for $50, so this code is a $12 drop and the lowest it has gone recently.

Features include:

• The ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) – the most advanced and optimized visual recognition algorithms ensure safe driving by providing real time Lane Departure
• Emergency recording feature – Enabled by G-sensor technology, the camera automatically saves footage in the events leading up to a collision and immediately after
• High Definition Image and First-class Night vision – 1920x1080p 60fps high speed video recording captures fast moving scenes and creates high resolution images in high speed. Note: Requires 8 – 64GB Class10 or above microSD card, sold separately
• Features 165 ultra wide-angle to reduce blind spots and obtain full 3 lane coverage. F1.8 apertures (the largest in the industry) and 3.0mx3.0m high sensitivity image sensors guarantee excellent night vision
• Built – in 2.7″ TFT LCD widescreen and intuitive YI Dash Cam App – The interface features large buttons and user-friendly icons for quick recognition and intuitive operation

Amazon users give it 4.3 stars based on more than 1,400 reviews.

You’ll need an SD card to record all the footage onto, so grab this 64GB SanDisk Ultra for just $23.

TL;DR

• What makes this deal worth considering? – This is $2 lower than previous deals, which had it at $40.
• Things to know before you buy! – There are a lot of dashcams out there, and each of them will offer something different. If you’re just trying to get started and see what they are all about, this is a great one to try.

See at Amazon

Happy Thrifting!

Day one Pixel 2 and 2 XL preorders doubled first-gen Pixels

Pichai used Alphabet’s latest earnings call to talk about Pixel 2 preorder performance and the company’s recent deal with HTC.

Alphabet held its latest earnings call on October 26, and during this, it was revealed that the company saw a revenue increase of 24% when looking at its year-over-year earnings. This was already impressive enough on its own, but when talking about Google’s hardware performance, CEO Sundar Pichai also announced that Pixel 2 preorders on day one were more than double the amount the company saw last year with the first-generation Pixel.

This is a huge milestone for Google, especially considering that this is only the company’s second time at truly creating and launching its own phone. Last year’s Pixel created for a bit of uproar for diehard Android fans between the axing of the Nexus brand and dated design, but display issues aside, Google appears to have made a much more positive impact on consumers this time around.

Also during the earning’s call, Pichai says:

To get these devices in people’s hands, we are also focused on scaling our go-to-market strategy. We are investing more in marketing, we are launching in more countries, and we are offering these devices in more retailers and we are already seeing results.

Pichai also references the HTC deal that went through shortly before the Pixel 2’s announcement on October 4, saying that its acquisition of the company’s engineers is “the foundation for our continuity efforts next year.”

The Pixel 2 and 2 XL are still two of the best Android phones you can currently buy, and when you combine them with the likes of the Google Home Mini, Home Max, and Pixelbook, it becomes very clear that Google is serious about being as powerful of a hardware company as it can be. This year certainly seems to be a success for Google, and I’m sure plenty of you are already excited for what the company will have to show off in 2018.

Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL

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HTC teases U11 Plus once again, this time shows slim display bezels

HTC’s finally jumping on the slim-bezel train.

This year’s HTC U11 is a mighty fine phone, but when compared to devices like the Galaxy S8, LG V30, and Essential Phone, it’s chunky bottom and top bezels really do look out of place for a 2017 flagship. We’re expecting HTC to announce the U11 Plus on November 2, and thanks to a new teaser from HTC, we have a closer look at just how little bezel the U11 Plus will ship with.

The image that HTC shared on Twitter looks very similar to one that went out earlier this week, but rather than a glimpse at the back of the U11 Plus, we get to see what appears to be the bottom left of the display.

You can see from the image above that the bezels aren’t entirely gone, but they’re drastically smaller than the regular U11. This reduction does mean that there’s no longer a front-facing fingerprint scanner, but HTC’s moved it to a sensible place on the back unlike all of Samsung’s phones this year.

Along with the slim bezels and rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, the U11 Plus should also come equipped with a beefy 4,000 mAh battery, 6GB of RAM, and an 18:9 display with a QuadHD+ resolution.

HTC U11 Plus shown off in renders, official announcement coming Nov 2

Android 8.1 hints at SMS Connect for sending texts via your Chromebook

This is huge.

Even though Android 8.0 Oreo just officially launched in August, that didn’t stop Google from releasing a beta for 8.1 earlier this week. Android 8.1 is a much smaller update compared to the jump from Nougat to Oreo, but there are still a few new goodies to keep an eye out for – especially if you’re rocking a first-gen Pixel.

During an investigation of the 8.1 beta, Ars Technica came across something rather interesting. An APK labeled as “SMSConnectPrebuilt” can be found within the beta, and although it isn’t readily accessible to users by default, the app can be launched through the use of an activity browser.

SMS Connect doesn’t look to be a proper application, but rather something that will be cooked into Android’s settings or pop up when setting up your device for the first time. The splash screen shows a messaging icon with the text “Set up SMS Connect” below it in Google’s new Product Sans font, and underneath that is the following message:

Read and reply to messages on your Chromebook. To set up SMS Connect, allow access to your phone calls, messages, and contacts. Your wireless carrier’s standard messaging rates may apply.

Image via Ars Technica

When tapping the Next icon in the bottom right and granting permissions to the above items, another screen appears saying “You’ll get notifications for new text messages on your Chromebook.” Ars Technica also reports that you can access SMS Connect via a Chromebook by typing chrome://flags in the address bar, turning on Enable Multidevice features, and then restarting your machine.

Android and Chrome OS are finally talking to each other, and that’s beyond exciting.

SMS Connect doesn’t appear to be working at all right now, but even so, this is very exciting for Android and Chrome OS users. Although no one likes to admit it, Apple’s been demolishing Google for years now when it comes to communication between all of your devices. MacBooks have been able to connect to iPhones to work with iMessage for years now, and while third-party solutions do exist for getting SMS messages on your computer, there’s never been a proper solution from Google. That is, until now.

It’s unclear at this point when Google will actually be enabling SMS Connect, but when you combine this with the Pixel 2’s ability to automatically tether to the Pixelbook, it’s easy to see that Google is doubling down on creating an ecosystem of devices that actually talk and work with each other.

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• Android Oreo review!
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Seawater desalination will quench the thirst of a parched planet

Humanity has sought to make the Earth’s oceans potable for thousands of years. The Norse tale of Utgarda-Loki tells of Odin being tricked into drinking from a horn connected to the sea, while Exodus 15:22–26 of the Bible likely describes Moses desalinating the water of Marah:

When they came to Marah, they could not drink the water of Marah because it was bitter; therefore it was named Marah. And the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?” And he cried to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a log, and he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.

Even the Greek philosopher Aristotle once observed that “salt water, when it turns into vapor, becomes sweet and the vapor does not form salt water again when it condenses.” Yet, despite the continued accelerating pace of technological advancement since we switched from BC to AD, turning salt water into fresh has remained more expensive than transforming it into wine. But as climate change continues to ravage the world’s watersheds, we may soon have little choice other than to turn to the sea’s bounty of H2O to keep our growing global population from getting parched.

Roughly forty percent of the world’s population — 2.3 billion people — lives in water-stressed areas, with that figure predicted to rise to a full two-thirds by 2025. Per the World Health Organization, another billion don’t have access to clean, piped water. So unless we want to try our luck with a Mad Max-style dystopia, we’re going to need to find new sources of drinking water, so why not the ocean? It does contain over 97.2 percent of the planet’s water resources and given that desalination only supplies about 1 percent of the world’s drinking water, there’s plenty of room to expand.

“The sea is the unlimited source from which we can create new freshwater through desalination,” Leon Awerbuch Director, International Desalination Association, told Filtration Separation, “and seawater desalination offers the potential for an abundant and steady source of fresh water purified from the vast oceans.”

“Desalination has decisively proven, during the last forty years, its reliability to deliver large quantities of fresh water from the sea” he continued, “so we can no longer view fresh water as an infinitely renewable resource because, unlike oil, fresh water has no viable substitute.”

Large-scale desalination efforts began in the 1930s, though they relied on the ancient principle that Aristotle described: a condensing dome sandwiched between a saltwater boiler and a coolant tank. Water vapor would rise from the boiler, collect in the dome and be diverted for human consumption. The entire process was highly inefficient and energy intensive, though it did eventually evolve into a process known as multi-stage flash distillation (MSF).

It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the modern, membrane-based reverse osmosis (RO) technology came into existence. In 1959, researchers CE Reid and EJ Breton first described the use of polymeric cellulose films for desalination and built the first working RO prototype. Four years later, a team from UCLA devised the first asymmetric cellulose acetate membrane. It would take nearly four decades for RO to overtake MSF. Currently, state of the art research is exploring the use of water-channeling proteins called aquaporins (AQPs), which the human body uses to ferry water across cellular membranes, as well as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for incorporation into RO applications.

As of 2015, roughly 18,000 desalination plants were in operation worldwide, 44 percent of them being located in the Middle East and North Africa. All told, they produce 22,870 million gallons of drinking water per day.

“I don’t see [the demand for desalination] slowing down any,” Michelle Chapman, a physical scientist at the US Bureau of Reclamation in Denver, Colorado, told Science Magazine.

Today, RO is the most efficient and widely accessible means of desalination at our disposal, capable of sifting the salt molecules and chloride ions out of both seawater (30,000-50,000 total dissolved solids mg/L) and brackish water (1,500 – 15,000 TDS mg/L). While it is still a resource-heavy operation — it takes a lot of energy to push salt water through these membranes at a sufficient rate — modern RO systems consume around a third of the power required by older MSF plants.

These two distillation technologies are not mutually exclusive and have been combined into hybrid MSF/RO systems numerous times in the past two decades. These hybrid systems work much the same way combined-cycle natural gas turbines do, with the MSF system generating low-pressure steam that can be used to drive a mechanical RO distillation process. Hybrid plants can also be combined with conventional power plants and renewable energy sources, using excess electrical power generated by those systems to drive the distillation.

Take the soon-to-be-completed Al Khafji desalination plant in the UAE, for example. It will produce 60,000 cubic meters of water per day while drawing power from a grid-connected solar power plant spanning more than 119 hectares and generating up to 45.7MW of power.

Not only do these hybrid systems reduce the plant’s carbon footprint but up to 40 percent, they drastically reduce fuel costs. “In the base case for a 455,000 cubic meters per day MSF desalination and 400 MW of electric power generation plant, the fuel consumption is 191 tons/hr and the annual cost requirement will exceed US$735 million,” Awerbuch writes in Water and Wastewater International, “By comparison, a hybrid 455,000 m3/day desalination plant based on 60 percent thermal and 40 percent RO will operate at reduced fuel consumption of only 115 tons/hr. This equates to a cost of US$443 million per year.” That’s an annual saving of $292 million.

Of course, cost and power consumption aren’t the only hurdles desalination must overcome, there are a number of environmental impacts that need to be addressed as the technology becomes more common — the first being, what do we do with all this brine?

Brine is the high salinity leftovers from the desalination process. It is produced at the same rate as freshwater in that for every two gallons of seawater that come in, one gallon of fresh and one gallon of brine go out. Coastal desalination plants often simply dump the brine back out into the ocean, however, that can wreak havoc on the local wildlife population. Since brine is denser than the seawater around it, the brine will quickly sink and spread out along the seafloor, shrouding it in a low-oxygen film which suffocates any marine life caught the area.

Beyond the brine, desalination plants may also pose a risk to the local ecosystem. These plants suck up massive amounts of water and, along with it, fish fry, eggs, plankton and numerous other organisms that make up the base layer of the food web. Data on the long-term impacts of these plants’ effects on their local environments remain scarce.

One potential solution to the intake issue is to suck the water in from underground. “Subsurface intakes are being used in a growing number of plants around the world, as new drilling technologies – like the directional drilling that has made hydraulic fracturing possible – have made subsurface intakes possible in more locations,” Heather Cooley, co-director of the Pacific Institute Water Program said in a 2013 statement. “Now, even where the site is surrounded by generally unfavorable conditions, it may be possible to find a pocket with the right ones.”

Unfortunately, installing these sorts of intakes is very expensive — especially in cases like the proposed Poseidon Resources desalination plant in Huntington Beach in Orange County, California where the entire seabed above the intakes would have to be dredged and excavated, then replaced with a different kind of soil more amenable to the saltwater incursion. The company also estimates that the intakes construction costs would tack on an extra $1-1.5 billion to the $2 billion plant itself. What’s more, the environmental costs in doing that could be astronomical.

So where do we go from here? Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any magic bullet solution to desalination technology’s growing pains, there is no revolutionary membrane technology just around the corner. Instead, the state of the art is likely to continue plodding along, making iterative improvement after iterative improvement, steadily driving costs down and efficiencies up as it has since the development of RO technology began.

That’s not to say that commercial scale (and commercially viable) desalination plants are unobtainable, just look at what Israel has managed to do. In 2004, the country pulled all of its potable water from the ground or collected it from rain. Today, five desalination plants provide two-thirds of the nation’s drinking water, nearly 582 million cubic meters of water annually. The Sobek plant, the country’s latest and largest, churns out 627,000 cubic meters of water per day alone.

However, even in places like Israel and the UAE, where the governments have made concerted efforts to adopt the technology, there are still some fundamental technical limitations that must be addressed. And addressed they will be, because, on our rapidly warming planet, we no longer have the choice not to.

The real consequences of Patreon’s adult content crackdown

NSFW Warning: This story may contain links to and descriptions or images of explicit sexual acts.

On October 17th, crowdfunding website Patreon amended the terms of its acceptable use policy as part of a wider program of reform. The new document was now much more proscriptive about what the site’s users could and could not use its payments platform for. Beyond tightening provisions around hate speech and illegal content, the site essentially banned sex workers and adult content of a sexual nature. Patreon had always described itself as “not for pornography” but offered a broad latitude for projects that contained erotic content, and the change has caused much upset in the community that produces such material.

Despite Patreon’s claims to the contrary, the site has clearly backed pornographers and sex workers in their projects. In 2016, the site very publicly enabled users to receive donations through PayPal subsidiary Braintree after a long battle with the e-commerce provider. It even emailed its adult content creators (a copy is available here), telling them that “as a company we are not happy with [PayPal’s] lack of transparency since it impacts the livelihoods of Adult Content creators.” Now, sex workers feel betrayed.

In her Open Letter to Patreon, artist Liara Roux describes that sense of betrayal, since Patreon had previously made moves to openly court sex workers. The artist even claims that the site offered tips on how adult content creators could use Patreon to fund movies and create websites to “reliably deliver rewards to our patrons.” The letter, at the time of writing, had around 250 signatures from creators who feel that their livelihoods are now under threat.

Based on public information, so far the signers on https://t.co/d1FNYAKCiE collectively have 46101 patrons representing $152,744 in income*

— Liara Roux (@LiaraRoux) October 27, 2017

Patreon’s revised document not only excised references to erotic art, however, but also included a number of new provisions related to sex work. These included forbidding the use of Patreon donations to produce pornographic material, maintain an adults-only website or solicit money in exchange for a private webcam session. All of which were apparently endorsed by Patreon previously, and are key mechanisms to enable sex workers to get paid.

An excerpt from Patreon’s previous policy that permitted sexual imagery.

Roux told Engadget that Patreon’s stance has caused a great deal of nervousness for the sex workers and artists who use the platform. “They can’t say they run a platform for niche artists and freedom of expression,” Roux said, “and also arbitrarily decide what is and is not ‘acceptable’ adult content.” The artist feels that any trust between the community and Patreon has now broken down as a result of the policy change. “The PayPal thing was huge,” said Roux. “It was definitely a big part of them gaining our trust.”

The only way that Roux can envisage Patreon becoming a trusted brand again is if the site says that it will welcome adult content and pornography onto its platform, even if that means placing it in a hidden, adults-only section. “It’s going to be very hard to believe them,” she added. “I’ve worked with them in the past on revising my portfolio, and they just changed the game again.”

The fallout from Patreon’s decision may mean that performers lose their entire income stream, since there are so few available options. “There are reasons porn is dominated by big companies,” Roux explained. “It’s very hard work to start your own site and start using a porn-safe [credit card] processor which is why you usually only see it from big stars.” Patreon, she said, “was that niche platform where those just starting out could still find their audience.” And there are very few alternatives available to those people who do not have the initial backing to launch such an enterprise.

Patreon’s policy was expanded as the result of controversy the site found itself mired in over the summer. In July, Patreon was forced to suspend a number of accounts that it found had violated its content policies. Lauren Southern and the members of Defend Europe had their pages shut down after using pledged cash to attempt to block efforts to save refugees. Not long after, Patreon also withdrew funding to It’s Going Down, a hardline left-wing news website.

In response to the backlash, Patreon CEO Jack Conte was prompted to post an explanation to YouTube. Conte explained that Southern and her colleagues “directly obstructed a search and rescue ship in the Mediterranean,” a violation of the rules on threatening or harming others. Southern denied her involvement in the project, but Conte used footage Southern herself filmed to back his claim. Similarly, It’s Going Down was suspended for doxing — the practice of publishing an individual’s address and phone number online — and advocating a number of property crimes like “pouring concrete over railway tracks.”

“The authority to take away a person’s income is a sobering responsibility and it is not something to be done on a whim.” —Patreon CEO Jack Conte

“We didn’t properly invest in an external communications plan,” said Conte, explaining Patreon’s alleged lack of transparency. The CEO said that while the decision to take down the accounts was the right thing to do, failure to communicate that properly was not. The company affirmed that it would hire more human moderators in its Trust and Safety team, develop an appeals process and improve policy education. Conte even ends the video with the line “The authority to take away a person’s income is a sobering responsibility and it is not something to be done on a whim.”

On October 18th, Patreon legal chief Colin Sullivan posted a lengthy essay in which he talked about “taking a clearer stance on some fringe areas of adult content.” Sullivan specifically mentioned taboo, illegal topics like incest, bestiality, sexual depiction of minors and aggressive sexual violence. But there is a disconnect between Sullivan and Conte’s stance and the revised policy that was made available, because the new policy expressly bans activity that the site has previously had no issue with, as outlined in the penultimate paragraph in the relevant section:

“Lastly, you cannot sell pornographic material or arrange sexual service(s) as a reward for your patrons. You can’t use Patreon to raise funds in order to produce pornographic material such as maintaining a website, funding the production of movies, or providing a private webcam session.” —Patreon’s revised guidelines

But as Motherboard’s Lux Alptraum wrote back in 2016, a long-standing problem for creators has been Patreon’s equivocation on what pornography actually is. The shorthand for what constitutes pornography in the United States comes from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio. The justice, when describing what constitutes pornography, famously said, “I know it when I see it.”

Motherboard’s report even drew attention to Four Chambers, which describes itself as “part art project, part erotica cinemascope” and would certainly constitute pornography in the eyes of plenty of folks. And yet, at the time, the page was apparently considered safe enough to remain. (Alptraum joked that the page “apparently gets a pass because the hard cocks and penetration are arty.”)

We sat down with a Patreon spokesperson who declined to be named for the purposes of this interview. That person reiterated that “any kind of porn has never been allowed on Patreon.” So why has the site, for so long, been silently (and sometimes vocally) accepting of accounts related to sex work? The spokesperson explained that Patreon’s Trust and Safety team does not go “scraping the site” looking for accounts to suspend, and relies upon user-based referrals.

“The TL;DR is that if what you were doing before was okay, then probably what you’re continuing to do is okay. And if what you’re doing is in too much of a gray area, then we’ll be reaching out.” —Patreon spokesperson

Instead, the company has doubled its Trust and Safety team and has provided the email address guidelines@patreon.com for creators concerned that they now violate the rules. “Let me be clear,” said Patreon’s spokesperson. “We’re not kicking off a bunch of creators en masse. Instead, we’re telling creators that there are things about their pages that need to be updated.” The spokesperson added that any creator who really is “concerned about how it’s going to affect their page and career, just reach out to us. It’s an open invitation.”

Engadget presented Patreon’s representative with pages* that, while adult in nature, violate only the new terms of service. One adult performer uses her account to create “sexy content for her fans.” In addition, one of the reward tiers offered “personalized sexy pictures” and “access to a secret Instagram account.” Higher-tier members were offered a “10 minute live webcam session, through Skype, once per month.”

Interestingly, even though this account appears to violate both the conditions for pornography and using webcam sessions as an incentive, the spokesperson didn’t feel like that the account would likely be deleted. That stance cannot be taken as a blanket statement that providers have nothing to fear, but also that the definitions are fuzzy. Because Patreon doesn’t appear to have a strict definition of what constitutes pornography, it may be that the accounts affected are an order of magnitude smaller than it would appear.

The spokesperson also tried to reassure creators by saying that “the TL;DR is that if what you were doing before was okay, then probably what you’re continuing to do is okay. And if what you’re doing is in too much of a gray area, then we’ll be reaching out.” As before, the spokesperson added, if users are worried, they can contact the company at the aforementioned email address to receive “personalized guidance” about “what you need to do to make sure your page can stay up.”

Despite Patreon’s reassurances, the content creators now find themselves concerned that their livelihood could be stopped at any point. Girl on the Net is the pseudonym for a British sex blogger who uses Patreon to fund a project creating “audio erotica.” The effort, which began as a way of enabling people with visual impairments to enjoy sexual content, has been running for less than six months. In that time, “the money I made from it meant that I could dedicate time to making a different, more accessible kind of erotic art,” the blogger said. She added that she was “using Patreon exactly the way it was intended: to fund art for people who were interested in that kind of art.”

The future of the audio erotica project now rests on whether Patreon judges it to be porn or erotica. Girl on the Net explained that, while this was a side project for her, “some of my colleagues have used Patreon to build a large platform or make a full-time living, and made Patreon a significant chunk of cash in the process.” The blogger posed the question “We have to wonder how many platforms have to censor sex before we say enough is enough. How much of it has to disappear before you start to notice?”

There is a prolonged history of direct and indirect violence carried out toward the sex work community. As Liara Roux explains, “the people who are going to have the most trouble working with them will be the most vulnerable.” She believes that Patreon’s decision threatens “vulnerable people,” including those who are “queer, trans and people of color,” who are often the ones most in need of the resources to build their own platforms to produce content.

In the UK, a law banning the practice of “kerb crawling” — driving a car slowly along the road for the purposes of solicitation — has had disastrous consequences. A 2002 report by The Guardian found that sex workers in the city of Sheffield previously operated in a well-lit, non-residential street with CCTV cameras. But a crackdown on prostitution forced the sex workers to move to a poorly lit industrial estate with no security cameras. There was a commensurate spike in violent attacks and murder.

There is a similar program of antagonism against sex work in the online space. Financial institutions like PayPal, JPMorgan Chase, Visa, Mastercard and Square have all sought to eradicate commerce undertaken by sex workers. Our 2015 report on the issue found that the process of redlining — a banking practice used to block service to black and Latino people, which was outlawed in 1968 — is alive and well online.

As a key conduit between the traditional banking providers and the internet, PayPal has a big say in how e-commerce is conducted online. Its acceptable use policy prohibits the purchase of items that it considers to be “obscene,” such as sex toys and other adult paraphernalia. In addition, users cannot use the service to buy “sexually oriented materials or services.” That’s why Patreon’s victory enabling payments from the platform was such a big deal back in 2016.

That 2nd to last paragraph is Patreon beginning its sex censorship against artists in a big way. MANY affected. Series C capitulation, much? https://t.co/qhoKIcZeLw

—Violent Boo ® 🎃 (@violetblue) October 23, 2017

Adam Grayson, CFO of the hardcore porn company Evil Angel, feels that there is a disproportionate amount of discrimination against the industry. “I would be more surprised if Patreon didn’t take this stance,” he told Engadget. “The financial industry always, almost without fail, discriminates against sex industries, legal or not. The time and energy our company puts into securing our basic banking needs is mind-blowing. And we’re a pretty boring taxpaying employer which just happens to sell pornography.”

On October 25th, Patreon published a response to Liara Roux’s Open Letter, written by CEO Jack Conte. The CEO says that it “broke” his “heart” that the creators who signed the letter “expressed fear for their pages.” Conte then reiterated that the site’s position has not changed beyond a firmer restriction on the aforementioned illegal content. Conte again justified the action, saying that Patreon has always restricted pornography on its platform and added that the policy would soon include restrictions on “real people engaging in sexual acts, such as masturbation or sexual intercourse on camera.”

“The financial industry always, almost without fail, discriminates against sex industries, legal or not.” —Evil Angel CFO Adam Grayson

There does seem to be some dissonance between Patreon’s stance, which is to restrict adult content, and the statements it is making. It claims to support creators and to not want to block accounts, but at the same time, it seems impossible that any sex worker or erotic artist can remain on the platform with the current policy framework.

The affected users remain unconvinced and posted a rebuttal to Conte’s letter shortly after his note was published. The group believes that Conte’s email has, if anything, made the situation worse than it already was. “We are sorry to hear that the way his company has handled our community ‘bugs’ him, but it’s hard for us to have empathy for those in power while we are fighting simply to be heard, create and survive.” Later, the group charged that “Patreon is saying that they believe sex workers unable to change or censor their work to fit new requirements should lose their income and that legal expressions of sexual creativity do not have a home on their platform.”

“This email exemplifies the mentality of Patreon and other tech companies that their image, perhaps to investors or banking partners, is more important than the wellbeing of the legal content creators who rely on Patreon as a source of income and one of the only “safe” spaces for us.”

*Engadget received assurance that pages discussed in the conversation would not be flagged to the Trust and Safety team, and we will not publish those specific addresses in this report.

Great, now there’s ‘responsible encryption’

Trump’s Department of Justice is trying to get a do-over with its campaign to get backdoors onto iPhones and into secure messaging services. The policy rebrand even has its own made-up buzzword. They’re calling it “responsible encryption.”

After Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein introduced the term in his speech to the U.S. Naval Academy, most everyone who read the transcript was doing spit-takes at their computer monitors. From hackers and infosec professionals to attorneys and tech journalists, “responsible encryption” sounded like a marketing plan to sell unsweetened sugar to diabetics.

Government officials — not just in the U.S. but around the world — have always been cranky that they can’t access communications that use end-to-end encryption, whether that’s Signal or the kind of encryption that protects an iPhone. The authorities are vexed, they say, because encryption without a backdoor impedes law enforcement investigations, such as when terrorist acts occur.

However, backdooring encryption is not the same as wiretapping. There’s no way for law enforcement to be specific about its “lawful surveillance.” Because of the way you’d have to break the end-to-end encryption, bulk data collection would be the only type of access possible. If the authorities were viewed as an attacker on a network, this could be called giving them “persistent access.”

Maybe that’s why Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul just introduced a bill prohibiting the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence from asking for technical assistance (from companies) to crack phones unless it’s in very limited circumstances. Infosec chatter believes this bill suggests Wyden is worried the feds will use the FISA process — requests for surveillance warrants — to force companies to make technical changes (as in, adding backdoors).

They’re not the only ones in Washington who think “responsible encryption” and its torch-bearers are suspect. “Look, it’s real simple. Encryption is good for our national security; it’s good for our economy. We should be strengthening encryption, not weakening it. And it’s technically impossible to have strong encryption with any kind of backdoor,” said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), when asked about Rosenstein’s proposal for responsible encryption at The Atlantic’s Cyber Frontier event in Washington, D.C.

Still, the problem with backdooring encrypted platforms is that they are no longer secure or private. And as we see every week in the news about everything cyber, if there’s a backdoor, the “bad guys” will find it and use it long before the so-called good guys know what’s happened. It also really, really doesn’t help that, right now, Trump’s “cyber czar” can’t even be bothered to show up to work.

Not to mention the little problem of surveillance and investigatory overreach we see regularly from government agencies (historically a la the NSA) and recently thanks to the Trump administration.

When we had arguments about encryption with our government agencies during the Obama administration, it was FBI director James Comey versus the world, and despite the issue being fairly straightforward about security, the blame was put on privacy advocates.

The tone for that pro-backdoor influence campaign was set in 2015 when CIA Director John Brennan gave a press conference saying multi-department information gathering operations — who need their encryption backdoors — were “hampered” by concerns about privacy. He blamed public “hand-wringing” over its surveillance programs as an obstacle to catching the bad guys.

The DOJ’s rebranding, by way of DAG Rosenstein this month, is like a Silicon Valley startup’s pivot that hopes doublespeak will help them win the war. By saying that there’s such a thing as “responsible encryption,” we’re led to believe that there’s such a thing as “irresponsible encryption.”

It’s like if Facebook said they practice “responsible privacy” (or “responsible democracy” for that matter). Think of it like Backwards Day. Here, encryption that is responsible is broken, and irresponsible companies and developers and apps are the ones who are running correctly implemented, secure encryption.

Rosenstein said:

Responsible encryption is achievable. Responsible encryption can involve effective, secure encryption that allows access only with judicial authorization.

It looks like Rosenstein was just warming us up for what came next. This week press reported that FBI Director Christopher Wray said “the FBI hasn’t been able to retrieve data from more than half of the mobile devices it tried to access in less than a year” AP wrote:

In the first 11 months of the fiscal year, federal agents were unable to access the content of more than 6,900 mobile devices.

“To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem,” Wray said. “It impacts investigations across the board — narcotics, human trafficking, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime, child exploitation.”

Wow, press noted, 7,000 devices seems like a lot. It’s too bad the FBI Director failed to include some fascinating facts. For instance, that requests from law enforcement to crack open encrypted phones actually doubled in the last half of last year.

When the “responsible encryption” groundwork was laid by Rosenstein, infosec Twitter erupted in its usual mix of laughter and disgust. Some called it dangerous, if not just reckless. Tech press called “responsible encryption” a myth. Naturally the EFF had some things to say, most hilariously that “Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein’s “Responsible Encryption” Demand is Bad and He Should Feel Bad.”

Rod Rosenstein was one of Trump’s handpicked appointees. As the deputy attorney general, he’s in a crucial position at the head of the investigation into alleged connections between the Trump administration and Russia. He was also the guy whose three-page memo was reportedly pivotal to Trump’s decision to fire former FBI director James Comey — Rosenstein wrote that Comey must be removed if the agency hoped to “regain public and congressional trust.”

Trump, as we know, is not a fan of encryption, whatever he seems to actually understand about it. When the FBI-Apple-iPhone encryption issue was brought to his attention, Trump insisted the company should be forced to comply with the FBI, or be punished with a boycott. “I think it’s disgraceful that Apple is not helping on that. I think security first, and I feel — I always felt security first. Apple should absolutely — we should force them to do it,” he said.

Like “going dark” — another buzzword pair used in the government’s agenda to break encryption — I’ll bet “responsible encryption” will be taken seriously (it shouldn’t) and find its way into an executive order. Because if ever we lived in a time when Backwards Day was every day, that time is now.

Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto (Hooded hacker); Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Rosenstein)

Twitter’s new hate and violence policies go into effect November 22nd

Just a couple of weeks ago, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey responded to the #WomenBoycotTwitter movement on his company’s microblogging platform with a promise to help Twitter “take a more aggressive stance” toward hate speech and sexual harassment. A few days after that, an internal email showed that the company was taking the promises seriously and widening its crackdown on violent groups and abusive content. The company just tweeted that its new policies will launch on November 22nd.

We will now launch our policies on violent groups and hateful imagery and hate symbols on Nov 22. During the development process, we received valuable feedback that we’re implementing before these are published and enforced. See more on our policy development process here 👇 https://t.co/wx3EeH39BI

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 27, 2017

The company began its recent process with a calendar of updates to their policies against sexual harassment, hate groups, and violent images. The policy changes include an expanded definition of non-consensual nudity to include content where the victim may not even be aware of the images taken, as with hidden webcams. Hateful imagery will no longer be permitted in avatars or profile headers.

Twitter also posted a blog post to help explain why it’s taking so long to create the policies themselves. In addition, the company posted new policies prohibiting the posting of private information, the definition of which may vary based on local laws. Twitter attempts to define private as credit card information, social security or other national ID numbers, private home addresses and non-public personal phone numbers and email addresses. It also defines non-private information as your name, birthdate or age, business address, where you go to school or work, and descriptions of your appearance.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey summed up his company’s recent work in this arena in a tweet, as well, with a link to the privacy policies mentioned above. “More clarity on our private information policy and enforcement. Working to build as much direct context into the product too.”

Source: Twitter

Kinect’s value to artists overshadowed its gaming roots

The Kinect is officially dead. But the reality is that Microsoft signed the do-all sensor’s fate years ago. Faced with slumping hardware sales in 2014, then-new Xbox chief Phil Spencer had a decision to make. Either Microsoft would drop the price of the Xbox One, or continue letting Sony and the $400 PlayStation 4 eat its lunch. So it stopped bundling the Kinect with the console and cut $100 off the asking price.

It worked. Microsoft doubled sales the next month, and this move has set the tone for Spencer’s tenure: reversing the string of bad decisions Microsoft made leading up to Xbox One’s debut. To illustrate the sensor’s waning importance to Microsoft, the Xbox One S didn’t have a dedicated Kinect port on the back when it was released in 2016. It’s the same with the upcoming Xbox One X except Microsoft isn’t offering a free USB adapter anymore. The writing has been on the wall for awhile now. If this week’s news was surprising, you probably haven’t been paying attention.

The truth is that Kinect’s greatest successes had nothing to do with gaming. Hackers adopted the sensor with open arms, using it for everything from interactive art installations to motion capture and even trippy stage shows for massive bands like Nine Inch Nails. Why? Because for the tech that’s on board, Kinect was relatively inexpensive and easy to use.

“It’s become the standard for interactive art because it’s affordable,” Rob Sheridan, NIN’s former art director told Engadget. “That’s the best gift you can give someone who has a vision of something creative.”

He compared the sensor and Microsoft’s quasi-open source approach to it to the advent of digital video at the turn of the century, and how that democratized video editing and production. “People can create interactive art in their bedroom now, and that’s something that everybody remembers as an important milestone in moving a creative medium forward.”

Two years prior to the Kinect’s 2010 debut, NIN went out on the road for its Lights in the Sky tour. The stage production featured all manner of high-tech toys including giant “touch screen” LED curtains and video screens. The problem was, it was all proprietary software and hardware from entertainment company Moment Factory, and as such the sensors and screens around the stage were a bit kludgy. NIN shows are far from relaxing; sweat and artificial fog are everywhere, and both make a mess.

Sheridan said there were “numerous” times where the sensors placed around the stage would need to be cleaned during a performance because they weren’t working right. That’d lead to the notoriously meticulous Reznor getting pissed off because the pantomiming he was doing wasn’t translating to the audience.

For 2013’s tour, things were different. NIN partnered with Moment Factory again, but instead of home-made gear, the production company had a simpler solution. “All of the clunky hardware they labored over so hard to get to work was now [replaced with] ‘Oh, just plug a Kinect in,” Sheridan said.

He used the sensors extensively as a way to capture the band’s shadows, and to digitally manipulate the silhouettes on rollable LED panels. Each panel had a Kinect mounted to it and as the setlist went on, the shadows would get progressively glitchier. With Kinect, the only problems the band encountered was if a cord would get knocked loose. “The difference was mind-blowing,” he recalled.

Independent game developer Mattia Traverso hasn’t designed cutting edge concert productions, but he did make one of Kinect’s best games, last year’s Fru. It has only sold a paltry 10,000 copies, but getting rich off of Microsoft’s sensor was never his goal. “I saw Kinect as a way to experiment and make cool shit,” he said. “We never really thought that we were gonna use Kinect to make money.”

In 2014 he entered a game jam with a few friends, not knowing one of them had a Kinect in his bag. Fru was the result, a game that doesn’t use the sensor’s voice recognition or skeletal tracking tech, but instead takes one player’s silhouette and projects it in-game as a means to bridge gaps or reveal secrets; the player becomes part of the 2D game environment itself. A second player moves a fox-masked girl along (or within) the in-game silhouette to reach platforms that would be otherwise inaccessible. It’s both charming and inventive as hell.

He said that Kinect in general was an interesting premise because of how it brought the human body into digital games. “When you were playing Fru, you were moving and contorting your body. You were balancing on one leg while moving your hands in a way that you would’ve not done in any situation unless you were a yoga master,” he said, laughing.

The problem, Traverso said, is that Microsoft marketed the sensor poorly. He said that when the Xbox One launched, there wasn’t a promise of what Kinect could do aside from control a TV with your voice. If you’re not a game designer, explaining what the Kinect can offer your living room was pretty tough. “That’s why it didn’t work. Nobody could imagine what their Kinect could be.”

“We needed a bigger gestation time to figure out how we could use it to make new kinds of games, and we didn’t necessarily have that. It wasn’t meant to be ‘hey, here’s this cool fucking thing that has so many games!’” he said. “No, it was meant to be ‘you don’t have to think about this as a weird, extra thing, think about this as a thing you use to control your console, like a remote.’”

Essentially, Microsoft positioned the last version of the Kinect as a mouse and once the company changed the Xbox One’s focus from being “the all-in-one games and entertainment system” to just being a video game console, the Kinect had to go.

Traverso wasn’t surprised by this, but he did seem frustrated. Fru garnered plenty of praise from the press and the thousands who played it, but gaining any sort of momentum was hard. “Nobody cared about Kinect anymore because the entity making Kinect was trying to pretend it didn’t exist,” he said. “This was the best business decision for them, but at the same time, my team and I were making a game in a market that the owner of the market was trying to shut down.”

Traverso doesn’t think history will be kind to the Kinect, and that it’ll sit alongside Nintendo’s Virtual Boy as one of gaming’s biggest experimental flops. That’s in part because the vocal minority of hard-core gamers will control the narrative. Since they were fed a steady stream of gimmicky titles, or games that they weren’t used to, they’re going to lash out. The problem is, for every Fantasia: Music Evolved from Rock Band developer Harmonix, there were a handful of clunky mini-game collections like Kinect Sports Rivals. So maybe the anger is justified.

Looking to the future, he hopes some of the Kinect tech like facial recognition keeps popping up elsewhere — like it already has in Instagram, Snapchat and the iPhone X. He proposed that since it’s happening for face filters and without “a crazy NASA-like” device such as Kinect, maybe we aren’t far off from easy silhouette recognition in more places.

“The pessimist in me thinks this technology would just be used for shitty Facebook filters, but I’d love a future where we try to actually make interesting interfaces for using our body,” he said.

Sheridan hopes Microsoft recognizes the impact it has had by opening the Kinect up to everyone, and that Redmond keeps embracing the hacker community moving forward.

He isn’t sure what to make of Microsoft stopping Kinect production, but thinks that ending manufacturing isn’t going to make the device itself extinct. There are countless sensors out in the wild, and plenty more still on Amazon and in Microsoft’s closets. “They might be killing it off as an official product, but I don’t think it’s ever going to die as something that’s beloved in the interactive [art] world,” he said.

Microsoft has said that there’s plenty of Kinect’s technology in HoloLens, too, and that its work on the sensor helped push HoloLens to where it is today. Sheridan has seen Microsoft’s helmet, and while he’s cautious, he thinks it could have a similarly bright future for interactive art.

“I’ve seen where they’re taking [HoloLens] with AR and I feel like if they embrace creativity the same way they did with Kinect, it could be the next Kinect.”