Stories are coming to YouTube as part of expanded Community feature

The stories. They’re here.

No matter where you go these days, stories are inescapable. Following their introduction on Snapchat, they’ve since expanded to Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and even Skype. The idea of sharing pictures and short videos of your activities throughout the day is apparently a popular one because the latest site to adopt this trend is – wait for it – YouTube.

Before you get too worked up about your subscription feed now being filled with video uploads and stories from every channel you’re subscribed to, YouTube’s showing some signs of restraint with how its take on stories is implemented.

Referred to as “Reels”, this is a feature that’s reserved to creators with 10,000 subscribers or more. Furthermore, Reels will only be seen on the Home page of YouTube as part of the Community platform that YouTube’s been testing with select users for about a year.

Reels in YouTube

Speaking of Community, YouTube is also expanding this to all creators that meet the same threshold of at least 10,000 subscribers.

In addition to posting Reels, creators can use Community to publish status updates, create polls, share GIFs, and promote other channels. You’ve likely noticed these updates in the YouTube app from time to time, but with this expansion, you’re about to see them a lot more often.

The goal with Community and Reels is to get creators more engaged with their fans outside of video uploads, and while the idea isn’t a bad one, there is the fear of this seriously cluttering up YouTube as a platform.

Examples of posts made with Community

What do you think? Are you excited to see more creators take advantage of Community and the new Reels feature? Let us know in those comments down below.

Google testing automatically playing videos in YouTube app

Galaxy S6 series and Note 5 on Verizon receive KRACK fix

This is unexpected, but we’re not complaining.

This past October, a vulnerability with the WPA2 Wi-Fi standard (referred to as KRACK) was discovered – putting a tremendous number of Internet-connected devices and routers at risk. We’ve seen numerous companies hard at work to get their hardware updated with a patch for this threat, and the latest devices being updated are a few older Samsung handsets on Verizon Wireless.

Both Samsung and Verizon have become quite notorious over the years for sluggish update turnaround times, so it’s a pleasant surprise to see this being pushed out to hardware that’s over two years old.

The specific devices being updated include the Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, and Note 5. In addition to the KRACK patch, this update also includes the latest November 2017 security patch.

Exact details on the update can be found on Verizon’s site here.

Samsung Galaxy S6

• Galaxy S6 review
• Galaxy S6 complete specs
• Galaxy S6 news | GS6 edge news
• Galaxy S6 beginner’s guide
• Galaxy S6 forums | GS6 edge forums

Amazon

Instagram testing Regram feature, GIFs in Stories, and more

REGRAM – IT’S FINALLY COMING

To say that Instagram’s added a few new features to its app over the years would be a huge understatement. Instagram’s now more feature-rich than ever with the likes of direct messages, Stories, live streams, etc., and according to a report from The Next Web, there’s plenty more that could be introduced soon.

One of the biggest things that’s been discovered is a feature called “Regram.” Regram is accessible as an icon below posts that show up on your timeline, and as the name suggests, tapping this will re-share that photo or video through your own account – think retweeting a tweet on Twitter. This is something that’s been embarrassingly absent from Instagram for far too long, and while third-party solutions do exist for similar functionality, it’s exciting to finally have something like this built into the app itself.

Also new is the option to search for and add GIFs to posts you publish to your Story. Swiping to the GIFs panel will showcase ones that are currently trending, and a search bar near the top left lets you narrow down what you’re looking for. Once you’ve found the perfect GIF, you can resize and reposition it wherever you’d like on the photo you’re working with.

Regram icon in Instagram.

Other features that were found include a new Close Friends List, the ability to share posts directly to WhatsApp, archive stories, and plenty more.

There’s no guarantee as to when or if any of these features will see the light of day, but in any case, you’ve at least got an idea of what to possibly keep an eye out for over the coming weeks.

Instagram adds option for ‘remixing’ photos that friends send to you

Federal employees stole data from Homeland Security

Three employees of the inspector general’s office for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are accused of stealing a computer system that contained around 246,000 employees’ personal data. That information included names, social security numbers and dates of birth, USA Today reports, and one of the suspects is also said to have had in their possession around 159,000 agency case files. The data breach was reported to DHS officials in May and acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke decided in August to notify the employees whose information was included in the stolen data.

However, the personal information doesn’t appear to be the three employees’ main target. Instead, investigators say that the employees were working on a knockoff version of the agency’s proprietary case management software, which they intended to market and sell to other federal offices. The stolen data was likely going to be used to help them develop and test the software. In a report sent to Congress, the office of the inspector general said it had, “seized all known servers and other devices potentially containing exfiltrated data in the possession of the subjects.”

According to the New York Times, one of the suspects has left the inspector general’s office while the other two have been suspended as the investigation continues. And USA Today reports that the employees affected by the data breach will be offered an 18-month credit monitoring subscription.

Other government agencies that have been impacted by data breaches in recent years include the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management, the Internal Revenue Service and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Like this breach, the OCC’s data was also taken by an employee.

The inspector general’s office has been updating congressional committees about the breach since it was first discovered. The DHS and the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia are both investigating the breach.

Via: New York Times

Source: USA Today

Amazon’s AI camera helps developers harness image recognition

Far from the stuff of science fiction, artificial intelligence is becoming just another tool for developers to build the next big thing. It’s built in to Photoshop to help you knock out backgrounds, Google is using AI to figure out if you have a person peeping on your phone and Microsoft uses the technology to teach you Chinese. As Amazon’s Jeff Barr says, “I think it is safe to say, with the number of practical applications for machine learning, including computer vision and deep learning, that we’ve turned the corner” towards practical applications for AI. To that end, Amazon has announced AWS DeepLens, a new video camera that runs deep learning models right on the device.

The DeepLens has a 4 megapixel camera that can capture 1080P video, along with a 2D microphone array. It’s powered by an Intel Atom Processor with more than 100 gigaflops of power, which means it can process tens of frames of video through the deep-learning AI systems per second. The DeepLens camera has WiFi, USB and micro HDMI ports, and 8 gigabytes of memory to run all that code on, too. It runs Ubuntu 16.04, and can connect to Amazon Web Serivces, too.

While primarily for developers right now, it’s not hard to see possible cool consumer applications down the line. Amazon has already put together some templates for devs to practice with, letting them use the DeepLens camera to detect things like faces, dogs and cats, hot dogs (or not) and a variety of household items, along with various motions and actions. Imagine showing DeepLens a bottle of shampoo, which then is recognized and relayed to Amazon to order you another bottle, or an attached device that can recognize your pets and feed them appropriately.

Barr notes that many future projects will likely run both onboard the device and in the cloud. “With eyes, ears, and a fairly powerful brain that are all located out in the field and close to the action, it can run incoming video and audio through on-board deep learning models quickly and with low latency, making use of the cloud for more compute-intensive higher-level processing. For example, you can do face detection on the DeepLens and then let Amazon Rekognition take care of the face recognition.”

Source: Amazon

Twitter contractor turned off Trump’s account by ‘mistake’

Earlier this month, the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account disappeared for about eleven minutes, however, the company never revealed who the employee was that deactivated it. Now TechCrunch has talked to Bahtiyar Duysak, a 20-something contractor from Germany who now describes the event as a mistake. Duysak worked in customer support with the Trust & Safety division and says that towards the end of his final shift, an alert came in that someone had reported Trump’s account. Although he put things in motion for it to be deactivated, he says he didn’t expect for that to actually happen.

Since the incident, Twitter said it has implemented safeguards that would prevent this from happening again, even as people continue to take issue with some of the President’s tweets that appear to violate the company’s rules. As for Duysak, he’s back in Germany where he said “I want to continue an ordinary life. I don’t want to flee from the media.” He’s not being investigated by the FBI and says he didn’t violate any rules, but hopes that people in the media will stop pursuing him via his friends and family.

Source: TechCrunch

Facebook temporarily stops advertisers from filtering by race

A year ago, ProPublica discovered they — and conceivably anyone else — could make ads on Facebook that weren’t shown to certain ethnic or racial groups. The social network claimed it would fix the issue and prevent legally-prohibited advertising discrimination on its platform. Weeks ago, ProPublica repeated its experiment and again found it possible to exclude ads along ethnic and racial lines. In response, Facebook has temporarily halted this advertising feature while it investigates how it has been used.

“Until we can better ensure that our tools will not be used inappropriately, we are disabling the option that permits advertisers to exclude multicultural affinity segments from the audience for their ads,” Facebook reportedly said in a letter to the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus; The document was shared with USA Today.

Facebook is suspending this feature, known on the advertising platform as its ‘multicultural affinity marketing’ targeting option, while it looks into how advertisers exclude groups. That investigation will go beyond race and ethnicity to understand how those from other demographics, like those from the LGBT community and religious groups, are also excluded using this advertising tool. Facebook will share the results of its investigation with the affected groups.

Going forward, ads that target specific racial and ethnic groups will receive additional scrutiny before appearing on Facebook, and their creators will have to confirm that they comprehend both anti-discrimination law and the social network’s policies. All ads will also get a button in the top right corner flagging them for review. These new requirements will be added over the next few weeks, and Facebook will again enable its ‘multicultural affinity marketing’ feature after its review process.

Source: USA Today

‘Destiny 2’ updates will give veterans a reason to keep playing

While it’s safe to say that Destiny 2 has sold well and is a solid improvement over its predecessor, there are still plenty of concerns. Seasoned players quickly ran out of new things to do, and there are gripes that its experience point system punishes some players. However, it looks like Bungie is tackling the issues head-on. In addition to tweaking experience points and cancelling a planned Curse of Osiris livestream (which would have seemed tone deaf), the studio has detailed exactly how it plans to extend the game in December and beyond. From a cursory look, it’s good news if you find yourself twiddling your thumbs.

The biggest additions: more rewards. There’s a new “Masterworks” weapons tier that gives your armaments random bonuses, stat trackers and other perks. You’ll also get a Heroic Strikes playlist with “more generous” Strike rewards, armor ornaments and more ways to spend your pile of legendary shards (such as faction gear). You can buy gifts that give extra rewards to everyone who completes an activity, even if they’re not on your side. The sometimes complicated mod system will give you opportunities to buy legendary mods. And of course, there are balance changes — “under-performing” exotic weapons (Sweet Business? Please?) will get a tune-up.

In 2018, Bungie plans to offer more incentives for other activities like prestige events (such as upgraded Nightfall Strikes), Adventures and Lost Sectors. Private Crucible competitive matches are coming. Also, Bungie is vowing to tackle rage quitters by instituting a penalty for those who jump ship before a Crucible match is over. You should see fewer players bailing just because they weren’t dominating in the first few minutes of a round.

The upgrades are bound to be appreciated if you’re a seasoned veteran. At the same time, it’s easy to draw parallels between this and the early days of the original Destiny. In both cases, developers spent the first few months sorting out the game economy and progression systems. While Destiny 2 is starting from a considerably better place (D1’s early approach was arcane at best), it’s evident that Bungie didn’t quite nail the execution the second time around.

Source: Bungie

Apple Design Chief Jony Ive Discusses iPhone X and Apple Park in New Interview

Apple design chief Jony Ive recently sat down for an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, where he once again discussed his work on Apple’s newest campus, Apple Park, and the latest flagship iPhone, the iPhone X.

As he mentioned in a prior interview, Ive is excited about the design space at Apple Park because it will allow the entire design team to work together. Industrial designers, font experts, motion graphics experts, and computer interface designers will be able to come together to interact in new ways and share ideas.

The design space will also feature several milling machines to create prototypes, which Ive believes are an integral part of the design process.

“I think you only really understand a material–its properties and attributes and, importantly, the opportunity the material allows–if you actually work it yourself,” Ive says. “And the most remarkable point in the whole process is when you make the first model. We might like it, we might not, but the first model you make, everything changes.”

On the subject of the iPhone X, Ive says its all-glass design and edge-to-edge display is something Apple “aspired to for years.” In comparison, Ive critiqued older iPhone designs. “It now seems to me a rather disconnected component housed in an enclosure,” he said of the iPhone 7 Plus.

The rest of the interview, which also includes anecdotes on Ive’s childhood and the Apple Watch, can be read over on the Smithsonian website.

Along with his interview in Smithsonian Magazine, Ive today spoke about the future of design at the Hirshorn Museum in Washington, DC. The one-hour speaking engagement took place at 3:00 p.m. local time and appears to have covered many of the same topics that Ive spoke about in the interview.

“We have so much trust as a team, that we don’t censor our ideas.” – Jonathan Ive, Chief Design Officer of @Apple, describing the creative process and dynamics of his team, “The best ideas come from the quietest voice. If you’re not listening, you’ll miss it.” #atHirshhorn pic.twitter.com/4dj1efGvs7

— Hirshhorn (@hirshhorn) November 29, 2017

Ive is also a 2017 honoree of the Smithsonian’s American Ingenuity Awards, designed to honor revolutionary breakthroughs in the arts and sciences, education, and social progress.

Tags: Apple Park, Jony Ive
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Honor 7X hands on

The Honor 6X was released a little over a year ago, and it was remarkably well received for a company that had yet to make a real impact on the US market. Packing an octa-core processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 3,340 mAh battery, it was the phone to beat for budget-minded consumers.

Now, Honor is back with the 7X, bringing an updated 2017 design, better cameras, and a faster processor. We went hands-on with the phone to see how it stacks up against other budget devices on the market.

In the hand, the Honor 7X has a premium feel. It has an all-metal chassis with rounded corners to fit well in your palm. It certainly feels like it could compete with other flagships, in terms of build quality. It’s quite thin too, at just 7.6mm (that’s .3mm thinner than the Google Pixel 2 XL). Coming in at 165 grams, it is also very light, despite still feeling sturdy.

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The screen isn’t 2K resolution, but that’s to be expected for a budget device. It’s got a Full HD+ 2,160 x 1,080 LCD screen instead, which, as we’ve seen with devices like the OnePlus 5T, is perfectly fine for most people. The colors looks quite punchy, and are accented by the bright and colorful wallpapers that come pre-installed.

At 407 ppi, you probably won’t be able to tell the difference between this and a 2K display with the naked eye, unless it’s something like the Note 8‘s outstanding OLED panel.

As you may have noticed, this phone has an 18:9 aspect ratio. This shouldn’t be too surprising, considering it is one of the biggest trends of 2017, but it’s quite nice to see on a budget device. There is now an 82.9% screen to body ratio, which isn’t quite as good as something like the Galaxy S8, but this is a far, far cheaper phone.

Honor tells me the wider screen in landscape mode increases the field of view by 13%. This supposedly gives you a competitive advantage in games. To my knowledge game engines would typically crop to fit, so this is something we will have to test further for the full review.

Powering that big, beautiful 5.93-inch display is a Kirin 659 octa-core processor running four cores at 2.36 GHz and four at 1.7 GHz, a Mali T830 GPU, and 3-4 GB of RAM. A 64 GB storage model with 4 GB RAM will be available globally, but the US will only be seeing the 32 GB version with 3 GB RAM. Storage is expandable up to 256 GB via a microSD card slot though.

In our initial hands on this hardware array seems to do quite well, launching apps and multitasking fluidly. We’ll have to test this further though, and will let you know our final verdict in next week’s full review.

The camera has been improved considerably since the Honor 6X. There are two cameras in the back of the device: a 16 MP main shooter and a 2 MP secondary camera. The second camera is for portraits much like all the other dual-lens cameras on the market (as well as the single-lens Pixel 2), but it doesn’t do a great job with depth. I was a bit disappointed with the results, but at this price point you can’t win ’em all.

For what it’s worth, the primary 16 MP shooter actually does quite well, remaining quite sharp for most circumstances. The biggest problem I’ve noticed is color accuracy, as it tends to over-saturate things. This is especially evident in pictures of people, which is a shame considering Honor marketed the selfie modes as a major perk.

The front-facing camera shoots at 8 MP, and actually does decently. The popularization of the selfie has resulted in front-facing shooters becoming higher quality, and that is particularly evident in this phone.

Below the cameras on the back you’ll find a fingerprint reader, which Honor says will read your biometrics in a quarter of a second. It feels very small— smaller than most other readers on the market. This isn’t exactly a deal-breaker, but it feels a bit odd. It’s also recessed a bit more than most other devices on the market, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing either, but I would have preferred it to be more flush with the back of the phone.

On the bottom of the device you’ll find a microUSB port, bottom-firing speaker, and yes, a headphone jack! I found it a bit disappointing that Honor used microUSB when almost every new phone released today is using USB Type-C, but when I asked about this they mentioned that they wanted to cut costs in areas that weren’t essential. I think they could have charged a couple dollars more and included the Type-C port, but Honor assured me that this device will be extremely competitively priced.

The Honor 7X packs a 3,340 mAh battery, which is the same capacity as the Honor 6X. While I would normally say that this would probably drain faster than the 6X thanks to the larger screen, the wonderful battery life we experienced in the OnePlus 5T is proof that battery life really can be optimized with good software. We’ll be running it through further testing to see if it can really last the full 1.38 days that Honor is advertising, so look for that in our full review.

Pricing and availability have yet to be announced, but stick around and we’ll be sure to let you know when they are.

Was the Honor 6X a compelling device for you? Would you consider picking up the 7X? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.