Plotagraph’s still photo animator can now create sweet morph effects

The software that turns a single still photo into an animated GIF is morphing into an even more advanced tool — On Friday, November 24, Plotagraph launched two new features and a website launch for Plotagraph Pro. The new tools allow photographers to create a morphing effect as well as adding more special effects tools.

PlotaMorph is a new tool inside the pro desktop version of the software. After layering up to 10 different images in the program, Plotagraph will morph the changes together. The tool allows photographers to create an effect that makes people or object appear to morph into a different person or object.

The PlotaMorph tool includes options to put that morph on an endless loop or to reverse the change at the end. Plotagraph says that users can also control the effect using custom line and spiral movements between those images.

While Plotagraph’s big perk is creating GIFs from stills rather than video clips, the PlotaMorph requires multiple photographs. The unusual effect, however, could be a good tool for grabbing viewer’s attention inside an oversaturated social media feed, or creating an artistic statement on change.

Along with the new morph tool, the software also now includes PlotaFX, a special effects suite for editing still photos. The tool allows users to add a variety of different effects to their photos for quick improvements. The instant effects can also be added using layers and then custom animated by bringing that shot into Plotagraph’s animation tools.

The company also launched the Plotaverse website. Along with access to pro account features, it allows creatives to apply to be featured as the artist of the day or to the ambassador program. Selected photographers as part of the Influencer Experience will be flown out to Maui to shoot with fashion photographer and Plotagraph creator Troy Christopher Plota.

For Black Friday, the company is offering a three-month subscription to Plotagraph Pro for half off — the deal is available until November 28. Plotagraph also has a scaled-down mobile version of the desktop software, Plotagraph+. Now through the end of the year, Apple is offering a free app code for downloading Plotagraph+ for users who download the app using the Apple Store app (not to be confused with the App Store).

Sony Xperia XZ and XZs now being updated to Android 8.0 Oreo

Oreo should also soon be available for the Xperia X Performance.

Sony’s Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 Compact are two of the company’s best phones in quite some time, and when they were announced, they were the first two phones on the market to ship with Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box. Sony’s commitment to snappy updates has really been shining through lately, and this continues with the Oreo love being shared to two of the company’s older handsets.

Both the Xperia XZ and XZs are now receiving an official update from Sony to Android 8.0.

With this update, the XZ and XZs gain Oreo’s app shortcuts, notification dots, smart text selection, the Autofill API, and picture-in-picture. In addition to all of Oreo’s regular goodies, Sony is also including Xperia Actions and Reminders. Xperia Actions are suggested settings that your phone will show you based on your usage, and Reminders are described as “useful prompts for unfished tasks, including emails in draft and messages.”

Along with all of this, Oreo also brings the latest November 2017 security patch to Xperia XZ and XZs.

The update weighs in at 1232Mb, and according to Xperia Blog, the Xperia X Performance should receive the update soon as well.

Android Oreo

• Android Oreo review!
• Everything new in Android Oreo
• How to get Android Oreo on your Pixel or Nexus
• Oreo will make you love notifications again
• Will my phone get Android Oreo?
• Join the Discussion

Pokémon Go developer Niantic raises $200 million in funding

A $170 million increase compared to Niantic’s Series A funding.

Niantic, the developer behind Pokémon Go and the upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards United AR games, has reportedly completed a Series B funding campaign in which it successfully raised $200 million. This latest round of funding for the company was supported by Founders Fund, Meritech, You & Mr. Jones, NetEase, Inc., and Javelin Venture Capital.

Compared to Niantic’s Series A round of funding in 2015 that raised $30 million for the developer, this is a big win. That money was raised shortly after Niantic first announced Pokémon Go, and this latest announcement for its Series B earnings comes less than a month after its latest project was unveiled – Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite will be another augmented reality game similar to Pokémon Go, but as you’d expect, takes place in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World with monsters, spells, witches, and more.

Niantic is partnering with Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment and WB Games for its Harry Potter title, and while exact details on the game are still fairly murky, we wouldn’t be surprised if it has a similar impact on the world as Pokémon Go did in 2016.

Pokémon Go developer announces Harry Potter: Wizards Unite

Razer Phone said to receive new camera features and improved performance

Updates include improved speed, zoom button, portrait mode, 4x slow-mo video, and more.

The Razer Phone is a really good attempt from Razer for its first ever smartphone, but as Alex noted in his full review of the device, there are a couple issues that make it tough to recommend – one of those being its camera package.

Camera performance on the Razer Phone just isn’t good in its current form, but according to Razer’s CEO and Co-Founder, Min-Liang Tan, the company is aware of the complaints and is working on making the camera as good as possible.

In a post published to Facebook on November 21, Tan said that “while the camera hardware and sensors are phenomenal” there are still software improvements that need to be made. Razer is reportedly working on increasing shutter speed, enhancing low light performance, and “other optimizations” that will steadily be rolled out to the Razer Phone over the coming weeks.

The Razer Phone’s camera might not be terrible for too much longer.

Tan says an update to the camera app that was released on November 17 improved stability performance and its interface and that these updates will continue to trickle out on a regular basis. Additionally, at some point during the next few months, Razer will be adding a button for instantly zooming in on a subject with the Razer Phone’s telephoto lens and 4x slow-motion video recording.

Lastly, when Oreo for the Razer Phone is released in Q1 of 2018, 60 FPS video, portrait mode, and further performance enhancements will be added as well.

The Essential Phone launched with a terribad camera, too, but after more than a few software updates, it’s now actually enjoyable to use. It remains to be seen if Razer can pull off a similar feat, but we wouldn’t count the possibility out just yet.

Razer Phone review: Don’t go outside

Amazon’s warehouse workers strike in Germany and Italy

As exciting as it may be go on an online shopping spree for Black Friday, there is a human price to be paid: thousands of warehouse workers often have to commit many exhausting hours to making sure your orders arrive on time. And some Amazon warehouse workers have had enough. Staffers at Amazon distribution centers across Germany and Italy have gone on strike over pay issues and conditions they believe “endanger the health” of employees. Complaints about a lack of bonus pay are central to the walkout, but there are also extensive concerns about what Amazon expects from its floor staff.

The German union Verdi claims that Amazon “permanently endangers” workers by pressuring them to do more and more in a shorter time span, with constant performance monitoring, a “poor leadership culture” and short recovery times between working stints. In short: even if pay wasn’t an issue, the risk of burnout would be.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Amazon didn’t say if it was negotiating with unions but did downplay the significance of the strikes. The “vast majority” of German and Italian employees came to work, Amazon said. It also pointed to its “record of job creation” and was “confident” it would fulfill customer demand during the holidays. When speaking to Reuters, Amazon added that its salaries were some of the highest in the logistics field and included perks like private medical insurance and money for training programs.

The strikes underscore the tensions that increasingly dominate online shopping. When companies like Amazon revolve around offering the lowest prices and shipping your goods as quickly as possible, cutting costs is important. It can be tempting to wring as much as possible out of warehouse employees, especially when robots could streamline (and theoretically replace) their jobs.

Via: TechCrunch, CNET, Reuters

Source: CISL, Verdi

The big stores that track your every online move

A study by Princeton researchers came to light earlier this month, revealing that over 400 of the world’s most popular websites use the equivalent of hacking tools to spy on you without your knowledge or consent.

So before you get all hopped up on eggnog and go hogwild doing your Black Friday or Cyber Monday shopping, you might want to find out which sites are seriously spying on you.

Using “session replay scripts” from third-party companies, websites are recording your every act, from mouse moves to clicks, to keylogging what you type, and extracting your personal info off the page. If you accidentally paste something into a text field from your clipboard, like an address or password you didn’t want to type out, the scripts can record, transmit, and store that, too.

What these sites are doing with this information, and how much they anonymize or secure it, is a crapshoot.

Among top retail offenders recording your every move and mistake are Costco, Gap.com, Crate and Barrel, Old Navy, Toys R Us, Fandango, Adidas, Boots, Neiman Marcus, Nintendo, Nest, the Disney Store, and Petco.

After publication of the study, called “No Boundaries,” both Bonobos and Walgreens said they would stop using session replay scripts.

The study is the first in a series from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). They were examining the world of “session replay scripts,” software that runs on a site the records everything you do. This can include your mouse moves, hovers, clicks, and typing — even if it’s something you wrote and deleted. The researchers examined seven of the most popular session replay companies: Clicktale, FullStory, Hotjar, SessionCam, Smartlook, UserReplay, and Yandex (the Russian search engine).

It’s not a new thing, but few people know it’s happening. If you’re a privacy nerd — and who isn’t these days? — the study’s data release was especially fascinating in its breakdowns. It’s a who’s-who of companies, news outlets, stores, services, and even a few porn sites. All of which know way too much about what you did and didn’t do on their websites.

Tech and security websites spying on users include HP.com, Norton, Lenovo, Intel Autodesk, Windows, Kaspersky, Redhat.com, ESET.com, WP Engine, Logitech, Crunchbase, HPE.com (Hewlett Packard Enterprise), Akamai, Symantec, Comodo.com, and MongoDB.

Other sites you might recognize that are also using active session recording are RT.com, Xfinity, T-Mobile, Comcast, Sputnik News, iStockphoto, IHG (InterContinental Hotels), British Airways, NatWest, Western Union, FlyFrontier.com, Spreadshirt, Deseret News, Bose, and Chevrolet.com.

Even passwords are included in these session recordings, according to Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, and in one instance involving SessionCam, they were sent to one of the companies providing session replay scripts. “We found at least one website where the password entered into a registration form leaked to SessionCam, even if the form is never submitted,” wrote CITP.

In a blog post one day after the study’s release, SessionCam founder and CEO, Kevin Goodings wrote “Everyone at SessionCam can get behind the CITP’s conclusion: ‘Improving user experience is a critical task for publishers. However, it shouldn’t come at the expense of user privacy.’ The whole team at SessionCam lives these values every day.”

The session replay scripts used by these websites are rather insidious. “These scripts record your keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior, along with the entire contents of the pages you visit, and send them to third-party servers,” CITP’s writeup on the study explained. “Unlike typical analytics services that provide aggregate statistics, these scripts are intended for the recording and playback of individual browsing sessions, as if someone is looking over your shoulder.”

If you want to look up a specific site, Princeton’s researchers released the data in a handy searchable database, complete with its methodology and caveats. For instance, they note that appearance of a website in their database “DOES NOT necessarily mean that session recordings occur, as website developers may choose not enable session recording functionality.”

However, they add that for some sites they do have clear evidence of session recordings occurring. “We mark these with the tag “evidence of session recording”. For these sites, our measurement bots were able to detect a recording in progress, as detailed in our detection methodology,” they explained. “For sites not marked with this tag, it does not mean that recordings don’t occur, simply that we don’t know if they do.”

All the sites listed above are among the sites found by the study to be actively recording sessions — there is no ambiguity as to whether or not sites like Old Navy are spying on your every move, and your every mistake. They are. (We’ve reached out to Gap/Old Navy for comment.)

Session replay scripts are made palatable by selling themselves as useful for finding web page mistakes, and problems with user interactions with a page. But according to Princeton’s research, a whole lot could be going wrong here.

More specifically, the study notes that “Collection of page content by third-party replay scripts may cause sensitive information such as medical conditions, credit card details and other personal information displayed on a page to leak to the third-party as part of the recording. This may expose users to identity theft, online scams, and other unwanted behavior.” They add, “The same is true for the collection of user inputs during checkout and registration processes.”

There’s supposed to be a sort of checks and balances for safety in place by companies that provide session replay scripting as a service. “The replay services offer a combination of manual and automatic redaction tools that allow publishers to exclude sensitive information from recordings.”

Indeed. But the onus is on companies such as Petco to redact that information, and it’s not as simple as it sounds. Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy wrote that “in order for leaks to be avoided, publishers would need to diligently check and scrub all pages which display or accept user information. For dynamically generated sites, this process would involve inspecting the underlying web application’s server-side code.” To our collective dismay they add “this process would need to be repeated every time a site is updated or the web application that powers the site is changed.”

That’s right: the sites snatching your information before you even have a chance to agree to any Terms of Service are the same ones responsible for administering a redaction process, if they decide to do so. And if we’ve learned anything about company responsibility and user safety and security, if something can go ignored or sloppily done, it already was and got covered up, and we’re all screwed, thanks.

Not only do Princeton’s researchers say that our data can’t reasonably be expected to be kept anonymous in these conditions. “In fact,” they state, “some companies allow publishers to explicitly link recordings to a user’s real identity.” As in, they’re linking the recordings of you to your account on their websites.

The session recording companies themselves were found to have troubling security practices. The researchers wrote:

Once a session recording is complete, publishers can review it using a dashboard provided by the recording service. The publisher dashboards for Yandex, Hotjar, and Smartlook all deliver playbacks within an HTTP page, even for recordings which take place on HTTPS pages. This allows an active man-in-the-middle to injecting a script into the playback page and extract all of the recording data.

Worse yet, Yandex and Hotjar deliver the publisher page content over HTTP — data that was previously protected by HTTPS is now vulnerable to passive network surveillance.

To counter session replay spying, you’ll need to use an ad blocker browser plugin that addresses these scripts. At the time of the study’s publication, CITP noted that “Two commonly used ad-blocking lists EasyList and EasyPrivacy do not block FullStory, Smartlook, or UserReplay scripts. EasyPrivacy has filter rules that block Yandex, Hotjar, ClickTale and SessionCam.”

Those lists, notably EasyPrivacy, are included in the AdBlockPlus plugin. In the days following the release and subsequent press, EasyPrivacy was changed to block FullStory, Smartlook, and UserReplay — so AdBlockPlus is a good solution for some, but not all of these pernicious privacy purloiners.

Since the study’s publication, session replay companies are scrambling to counter the negative press. Like SessionCam, they’re suggesting the study was overly dramatic and clinging to the spin that their tools are simply data collection for the purposes of improvement. SessionCam’s CEO exclaimed, “Using behavioral analytics solutions to understand website visitors better is more often a sign of good intent — the company wants to get it right.”

Unfortunately, for most of us, the “to make your experience better online” is too tough to swallow in the era of Facebook.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like helping any of these companies do their jobs right by sitting quietly as they take my personal information without my ability to say no. Especially not because I just happened to land on their websites. No one should.

Images: PA Imagess (Girl on Laptop); Getty (Holiday shopping)

NASA goes back to the middle ages for its rover tire design

The Mars Curiosity rover has been a big success, but NASA’s modern tech couldn’t save its tires from breaking down in the harsh conditions of Mars. For future missions, the agency has gone back to the age of knights. Based on the principals of chainmail armor, the “Superelastic” tires can withstand more deformation than any other non-pneumatic tire. At the same time, they could potentially withstand extraplanetary abuse and provide better traction for next-generation rovers.

Curiosity’s wheels have taken a lot of damage because they don’t have much give, and Mars rocks can be particularly jagged. NASA’s new chainmail type material, on the other hand, provides a lot more flexibility, while still being difficult to penetrate, as shown in the video below. In another configuration, the material could also be useful to NASA as an all-purpose, lightweight heat and debris shield for orbiting spacecraft.

It’s not just the chainmail-style configuration that makes the tires work, though. They’re also built from alloys like nickel-titanium (NiTi) that can deform up to 10 percent deformation without losing their shape. “The use of a NiTi shape memory alloy yield a superelastic tire that is virtually impervious to plastic deformation,” according to the team at NASA’s Glenn Research center.

The tires probably won’t be on the next Mars rover, but could find their way to future designs, including crewed exploration vehicles. They could even be useful here on Earth. “The Superelastic tire offers traction equal or superior to conventional pneumatic tires and eliminates the possibility of puncture failures, thereby improving automobile safety,” NASA said.

Via: Design Boom

Source: NASA