The Morning After: Wednesday, November 8th 2017

Hey, good morning!

Welcome to Wednesday. The FBI battles with smartphone encryption once again, there’s a new type of energy fusion and we struggle with shaving a giant’s leg in Your Hands Are Feet.

A digital wallet is only as trustworthy as the software that manages it.
Code mistake freezes up to $280 million in digital currency

Digital wallet company Parity is warning its users that a large volume of Ethereum funds have effectively been frozen after one coder accidentally deleted the library needed to use multi-signature wallets (those that require more than one signature to move funds) created after July 20th. They triggered a long-unpatched bug that turned Parity’s wallet contract into a standard multi-signature wallet, making every wallet suicide and erase the guiding library code.

Whether or not you believe it was a mistake, it could have very serious consequences. Observers estimate there could be more than one million in ether locked away, which would amount to roughly $280 million.

Prime Video is nearly everywhere now, so this gives folks a way to watch it.
Amazon made a budget Fire TV Stick for the rest of the world

Amazon has unveiled the Fire TV Stick Basic Edition in over 100 countries, including Canada, France, Italy and Spain. It costs €60 in Europe but has been temporarily marked down to €40 for Prime customers. Amazon recently launched Prime Video around the world (both with and without the regular Prime service). The Fire TV Stick Basic Edition comes with quad-core processor, 1GB of memory and 8GB of storage, so despite the name, it appears to be the same as the $40 Fire TV Stick currently sold in the US. The main difference is that the US version comes with an Alexa remote that can take voice commands, while the Basic Edition has, well, a basic remote.

Back to basics.
Microsoft will create game studios to ensure more Xbox One exclusives

Microsoft has been chasing Sony in console sales for years and has subsequently entered a pattern of shuttering internal studios and cancelling games. Now, according to an interview with Xbox chief Phil Spence, the Washington-based company is going to do the opposite: start or acquire studios to develop more games and software in-house.

This is sure to reignite the encryption debate.
The FBI can’t unlock the Texas church shooter’s phone

At a press conference, an FBI official investigating the man who killed 26 people in a Texas church last Sunday said the agency can’t open the shooter’s encrypted phone. The agent painted the issue as a growing concern among law enforcement at all levels who can’t access data on devices without their owner’s credentials.

A room-scale VR adventure
‘Your Hands Are Feet’ puts you inside a psychedelic egg yolk

Let’s get weird. We explore the first of four immersive-media projects coming from our Alternate Realities grant program. The bizarre world of Your Hands Are Feet will debut, along with four other prize-winning immersive-media projects, at the Engadget Experience on November 14th, 2017. For more information about the Engadget Experience and to grab a ticket, check out all the details here.

But wait, there’s more…

• Quark fusion makes 10 times as much energy as nuclear fusion
• The surprising Islamic beauty of ‘Engare’
• NVIDIA GPUs are ‘Star Wars’ merch now
• What we’re playing: ‘Super Beat Sports’ and ‘Animal Crossing’

Uber works with NASA to get flying taxis ready by 2020

They say the best revenge is living well, and so in the midst of its ongoing and messy breakup with London, Uber has proven it’s doing just fine thank you very much by signing an agreement with NASA to develop software for its proposed flying taxi project, Elevate.

At a speech at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Uber’s head of product Jeff Holden revealed the company has signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA to create the air traffic control system that will manage its low-flying taxi fleet, which it aims to have in the air by 2020. The company also announced that a third test city, Los Angeles, has been added to the program, joining Dallas-Fort Worth and Dubai. According to Uber, its UberAIR service could compress a one and a half hour journey from LAX to the Staples Center during rush hour to under 30 minutes.

Uber released a slick video, seen above, alongside its announcement, illustrating just how it envisions the Elevate service being used. It closes with the line “closer than you think”. With NASA’s clout behind the project, the idea of a flying taxi service is not only closer, but a whole lot more credible, too.

Via: The Verge

Source: Reuters

Aldi’s latest bargain is a 3D printer

When you think of Aldi, you’ll likely picture low-priced fresh fruit and veg, cheap alcohol and metal bins full of “Specialbuys”. Each week, it’s a lottery on whether there’s a special on power tools, slow cookers or bedding. But what about a 3D printer? The budget retailer announced today that it will become the first UK supermarket to stock such a gadget with its £300 Balco 3D Printer.

According to Aldi, the printer is easy to set up and the print quality is on par with models worth three times the price. It features touchscreen controls, step-by-step wizards and can also print directly from an SD card.

The 3D printer will be available via the Aldi website from November 23rd, alongside a 55-inch 4K LED Smart TV (with three HDMI ports) and “Premium” Bluetooth soundbar that supports AirPlay and Spotify. They’ll go on sale for £430 and £130 respectively.

While Aldi suggests its products are just as good as Samsung’s MU7000 panel and Bose’s SoundTouch 300 Wireless Sound Bar, we’d suggest you pore over the specifications once they become available before putting any money down.

Deliveroo’s delivery fee-dodging subscription is going nationwide

Like any addiction, a Deliveroo dependency can get pretty expensive between the cost of food and the £2.50 delivery fee. But Deliveroo isn’t your average peddler, and earlier this year it launched a subscription service that offered power users the option to dodge all delivery fees in exchange for a fixed monthly payment. After ‘trialling’ Deliveroo Plus in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Brighton and York, the company has said today it’s expanding the service nationwide. It’s cheaper than it was initially, too, now costing £8 per month instead of £9, though there’s no longer the option of getting a discount by paying for a year upfront.

As of today, Deliveroo Plus is now available in 45 towns and cities — this includes London, by the way — with further rollouts planned in the coming months as Deliveroo takes the subscription UK-wide. During the first two months, Deliveroo says half of all users dodge around £25 in delivery fees, with the greediest 10 percent saving £75. To check whether you’re covered by the expansion on day one, head to your account page within the app, where the option to sign up will present itself. And if it’s not there? Well, you don’t have to completely break up with UberEats just yet then, do you?

Via: Business Insider

Snapchat Plans Radical Overhaul to Make Social Platform Easier to Understand

Longtime Snapchat users should prepare themselves for a radical overhaul of the way the mobile app works, based on comments made by Snap CEO Evan Spiegel in his earnings letter to investors on Tuesday.

With the company falling short of lowered projections for growth, Snap put much of the blame on the fact that the social platform is simply a mystery to outsiders. “One thing we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use,” wrote Spiegel. “Our team has been working on responding to this feedback.”

Few details were provided on the planned redesign, but Snapchat said it was working on an algorithm to show people a more personalized version of the stories they might want to see.

“We are developing a new solution that provides each of our 178 million daily active users with their own Stories experience,” wrote Spiegel, “leveraging the tremendous benefits of machine learning without compromising the editorial integrity of the Stories platform that we have worked so hard to build.”

Spiegel said that the changes would make it easier for users to see content from people who aren’t their friends, but that private conversations between close friends would remain a bulwark of the app.

The esoteric nature of the social platform has apparently moved Snap to make these drastic changes, but the danger is that it could alienate existing users. However, Spiegel said the company was willing to bear the consequences.

“There is a strong likelihood that the redesign of our application will be disruptive to our business in the short term, and we don’t yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application,” Spiegel said in his prepared remarks to investors. “We’re willing to take that risk for what we believe are substantial long-term benefits to our business.”

Snap’s third quarter revenue was $207.9 million, not the $235.5 million analysts had predicted. Shares fell as much as 22 percent in extended trading as a result, before recovering slightly to trade down 17 percent.

Sales estimates for Snap have been dropping since its March initial public offering, with the company apparently unable to clearly explain to advertisers how Snapchat works, despite providing investors with detailed instructions during its initial PO. The lack of a news feed and no ability to share, like, or comment on posts has also proved a stumbling block.

Against this backdrop, Facebook’s habit of copying Snapchat features and building them into its own apps has only weakened the uniqueness of Snap’s offering in the social media landscape – a key factor of the company’s business model. It remains to be seen exactly what a redesign will mean for Snapchat and its users, and no timeline for the rollout has been made public.

Tags: Snapchat, Snap
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Warby Parker App Uses iPhone X TrueDepth Camera to Find Your Ideal Specs

Spectacles company Warby Parker recently updated its mobile app to include a novel implementation of Apple’s face recognition technology exclusive to the iPhone X.

The glasses app uses the smartphone’s front-facing TrueDepth camera to map the user’s face and create an ideal fit for a new set of frames.

Warby Parker using the iPhone X TrueDepth camera is super super smart: pic.twitter.com/LgHpO8hfUx

— Joanna Stern (@JoannaStern) November 7, 2017

Apple’s Face ID authentication works by projecting 30,000 dots on the surface of a person’s face, accurately mapping its curvature and unique features.

The camera’s sensors also capture the data in three dimensions, and it’s this technology in particular that the glasses app uses to recommend to the user a series of frames that it thinks will fit their facial structure.

The only failing of the app is that it doesn’t (yet) place the spectacles on the user’s face, Snapchat-style, to let the customer see what they look like wearing them.

Apple’s ARKit augmented reality framework would seem to be the obvious solution to this lack. We’ve reached out to Warby Parker to ask if they have any plans to make use of it, and will update this article if we hear back.

(Via Mashable.)

Related Roundup: iPhone XBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Buy Now)
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Twitterrific for Mac 5.2 Brings Experimental Twitter Poll Detection Feature

Twitterrific for Mac received a new update on Tuesday, adding a host of new features and improvements including the ability to quickly search for a user, restoration of Searches and Lists between launches, improved syncing of the reading position, and a unique experimental feature – Twitter poll detection.

According to the developer’s notes, Twitterrific now attempts to automatically detect when a tweet in the user’s feed contains a poll and displays a new status button at the bottom of the tweet to indicate this.

Clicking the button opens the poll in an integrated mini-browser that users can then use to submit their vote. Like the app’s other popover windows, the poll can be detached from the main timeline to let users keep up to speed with incoming results.

The feature is labeled “experimental” because Twitter doesn’t make an API available for third party apps to recognize polls in user feeds, so Twitterrific has to look for specific markers that give clues a tweet might be a poll. These markers include hashtags like #poll, the graph showing incoming results, and the ballot box emoji.

The app also looks for specifically structured questions to identify polls, according to the developers, and if any of these factors are positive, the poll status button is displayed. As it is, polls can only be created through official Twitter channels, but tagging said tweets with #poll will help let other Twitterrific users know they can take part.

Twitterrific 5.2 for Mac is available as a free update on the Mac App Store [Direct Link]. The app is $19.99 for new users.

Tag: Twitterrific
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Apple Reportedly Working on Augmented Reality Headset With Custom ‘rOS’ Operating System

Apple is ramping up development of an augmented reality headset that will have its own display and run on a new chip and operating system, according to well-connected Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman.

A fanciful mockup of digital glasses via TechAcute
Apple aims to have technology ready for the headset by 2019, and could ship a product as early as 2020, the report claims. But the development timeline is said to be “very aggressive” and could still change.

The headset’s custom operating system, based on iOS, is reportedly dubbed “rOS” for “reality operating system.”

Just as tvOS powers the Apple TV, macOS runs on Macs and watchOS runs on Apple Watches, “rOS” will power Apple’s AR headset. Geoff Stahl, formerly a software manager for games and graphics at Apple, is one of the directors of the “rOS” software group.

Apple hasn’t finalized how users will control the headset and launch apps, but it is investigating touchscreens, Siri voice activation, and head gestures as it creates prototypes, according to the report.

Engineers are prototyping a range of applications, from mapping and texting to more advanced features including virtual meeting rooms and 360-degree video playback. The company has discussed pairing the headset with its own version of the App Store, where users would be able to download content, just as they do with the iPhone, Watch, Apple TV and Mac.

Apple software engineers are said to be using HTC Vive headsets, while working on a device similar to an Oculus Gear VR headset that uses an iPhone’s display and other hardware, both for internal testing purposes only.

An augmented reality headset is one of several hardware and software projects that a team of Apple software engineers are supposedly working on under the umbrella code name of “T288” in Cupertino and Sunnyvale.

The same team was behind ARKit, which provides developers with tools to create augmented reality apps for iPhones and iPads.

Gurman previously reported that Apple was considering a pair of smart glasses that would connect wirelessly to an iPhone, much like the Apple Watch, and display “images and other information” to the wearer.

The Financial Times has also reported about Apple experimenting with “several different kinds” of wearable augmented reality prototypes, as it tries to figure out the “most compelling application” for a headset.

Apple CEO Tim Cook alluded to any headset being at least a few years away during a recent interview about augmented reality.

“Today I can tell you that the technology itself doesn’t exist to do that in a quality way,” Cook said. “We don’t give a rats about being first, we want to be best in creating people’s experiences. Something that you would see out in the market any time soon would not be something that any of us would be satisfied with.”

Related Roundup: Apple VR ProjectTag: bloomberg.com
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Honor 9i review

Honor has launched some pretty good phones in the last year or so. Slowly but surely it’s been establishing a foothold in markets like India. The company has also not shied away from adopting, or even being early on, trends like dual cameras.

With the Honor 9i, the company is now delivering on this year’s new trends. Like most other 2017 releases, the 9i has a taller display with an  18:9 aspect ratio. It combines that with dual cameras on both the front and back — a rare combination that works for both photography enthusiasts as well as selfie lovers.

The Honor 9i aims to offer more for less, and the list of features, as well as the specifications sheet, is not off the mark. But does it succeed in doing so and manage to bring together a compelling device? You’ll find out in our Honor 9i review.

Design

While Honor prefers to talk more about the camera setup and the display on the Honor 9i, I think the design is one of the highlights of the smartphone. As has been the case with most recent Honor devices – exceptional design makes this phone stand out from the crowd.

The metal unibody design of the Honor 9i looks premium and its solid construction inspires confidence in the build quality. The quality of materials is top notch as well.

The camera module on the back protrudes a little but has a metal rim around it to protect from scratches. This is actually an aberration for Honor/Huawei devices, which have been promoted with a ‘flat-back dual camera’ as a marketing pitch in the past. Many of those were in higher price segments, though.

The metal unibody design of the Honor 9i looks premium and its solid construction inspires confidence in the build quality.

The phone’s matte finish and curved edges make it very comfortable to hold. The 18:9 aspect ratio display and slimmer bezels around it mean that the 5.9-inch display on the device is easy to grip in one hand. It’s roughly the same size as most smartphones in the market with a 5.5-inch display.

Like we’ve seen in a few other devices with taller stances, you might need to stretch your fingers to reach the volume rocker on the edge or the fingerprint sensor at the back. It really depends on how and where you hold the phone. If you’ve got small hands, you might need to shift your grip often to move around so you might want to consider a case if you’re at all clumsy.

For me, and many others, the first glance at the phone is more important than the specifications sheet and the Honor 9i fares well here, with an impressive aluminum chassis and stylish design.

Display

The Honor 9i is the company’s first smartphone with a Full HD+ (2,160 x 1,080) display with 18:9 aspect ratio. The IPS LCD also looks beautiful especially with little bezels around it. There’s a high 83 percent screen-to-body ratio – impressive for a smartphone at this price point.

The display is incredibly sharp, and the color saturation is pretty good. It’s not perfect because brightness is a tad disappointing outdoors which affects sunlight viewing. But the contrast ratio is impressive and viewing angles are great too.

The tall display on the Honor 9i is one of the defining features of the device, and the company does a good job here. It looks great at first glance, but I would’ve liked a little more vividness.

Performance

The Honor 9i is powered by the octa-core Kirin 659 SoC, and packs in 4 GB of RAM. The Kirin 659, which debuts in India with the Honor 9i, is made using the 16nm manufacturing process by HiSilicon, a Chinese semiconductor company fully owned by Huawei. The phone’s got 64 GB of internal storage, which can also be expanded up to 128 GB using a microSD card.

The performance of the Honor 9i is on par with the competition. For everyday tasks, the phone runs smoothly. Once you start gaming, the chinks in its armor start to appear though. There is occasional lag and random stuttering. It’s not too bad and a lot of casual users won’t notice it, but if gaming is a critical aspect of your phone usage, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere.

The phone doesn’t get hot in day-to-day activity although it does get warm when gaming for a while. It’s never too hot or uncomfortable, though.

The 3,340 mAh battery on the Honor 9i provides a day’s worth of battery life. It’s good enough, but nothing special. The battery drain is quite noticeable during processor-intensive tasks like gaming, so you might want to be careful on your way back from work in the evening. When you’re not pushing the processor though, the phone manages power well.

Overall, the performance on the Honor 9i is good enough, but not groundbreaking by any measure.

Hardware

The Honor 9i includes a hybrid tray which can take two nano-SIMs, or you can swap the second SIM for a microSD card. Most people don’t prefer a hybrid setup, but 64 GB would be good enough storage for most users and this isn’t a showstopper.

Unfortunately, the Honor 9i does not support fast charging, nor does it sport a Type-C port. Even for a smartphone in its price segment, microUSB looks dated.

Camera

The highlight of the Honor 9i is the dual camera setup at the back as well as on the front. There’s a 16 MP rear camera and a 13 MP front camera, both of which are paired with 2 MP secondary cameras to capture depth information. This allows you to take photos with a depth of field effect, or bokeh, as well as portraits. There’s an LED flash at the back and a soft selfie flash on the front.

The highlight of the Honor 9i is the dual camera setup at the back as well as on the front.

In good lighting conditions, the rear camera combination produces nice photos. The details are good and color saturation is perfect. While the f/2.2 aperture on the primary lens doesn’t look good on paper for low light, the photos come out just fine with quite a good color reproduction and not much noise.

That said, the camera on the back of the Honor 9i is inconsistent and often errs in color reproduction and sometimes the photos lack details.

The front camera fares better than most smartphones in this price range. The photos come out sharp, and with a good amount of detail.

The dual camera setup allows you to take bokeh images, and in most cases, the background and foreground separation by the 2 MP secondary camera is good – even in low light. However, the software-driven blurring is pretty obvious. The front camera too offers the ability to click selfies with a bokeh effect and surprisingly does a great job at it.

The beautification mode is quite strong and clears the skin completely, but it looks unnatural and photos are clearly not you.

Software

The Honor 9i runs the company’s proprietary skin EMUI 5.1 out of the box. Based on Android 7.0 Nougat, EMUI is quite a departure from stock Android or other Android skins but it doesn’t take much time to get used to. With EMUI 5 earlier this year, Huawei introduced the ability to choose between the default UI without an app drawer or pick one with an app drawer.

To make the user experience comfortable on a large display, EMUI offers a single-hand mode that shrinks the display down to one corner of the screen. A lot of apps aren’t ready for an 18:9 display yet and run with a black bar at the bottom, or you can scale them to fit the screen. For a lot of apps and games, it works out just fine.

EMUI is a very well-thought out and functional Android customization layer.

The phone comes with a lot of pre-loaded apps and tools that Huawei could’ve done without, like the Mirror or Torch app. Some of these cannot be uninstalled, only disabled.

EMUI is a very well-thought out and functional Android customization layer. Unlike its earlier iterations, it feels fluid and offers quite a few nifty features to improve the user experience. However, like with all software experiences, it is a matter of individual preference.

Specifications

Gallery

Pricing and final thoughts

The Honor 9i has a lot going for it, it but isn’t without a few shortcomings.

The Honor 9i strikes a nice balance between features and cost while going all-in on current trends. It’s got a full vision display with 18:9 aspect ratio, dual cameras, and a striking chassis.

It is not perfect though. The performance is good enough for the daily grind, but it could’ve been better. Same goes for battery life. The marquee feature – its dual cameras – are pretty good, but don’t take your breath away.

Yet, at ₹17,999 ($277) in India, the Honor 9i is a fine package and a good option on the table for a sub-₹20,000 smartphone. It offers enough bang for the buck and is one of the better-looking devices out there.

EPA approves ‘good guy’ mosquitoes to battle Zika

Soon, a startup called MosquitoMate will be releasing a plethora of mosquitoes across the US — not to start a bug-pocalypse, but to prevent it. The US Environmental Protection Agency has just approved the use of the startup’s mosquitoes as biopesticide against their Zika-, dengue- and other disease-carrying counterparts in 20 states and Washington DC. You see, MosquitoMate’s insects carry a common bacterium called Wolbachia pipientis that infects a wide range of invertebrates. By releasing them into the wild, they can spread bacteria to the wild population of Aedes albopictus or Asian tiger mosquitoes.

The company will raise their bugs in the lab, separate males and females and then release the males, which don’t bite, into treatment areas. When the bacteria-carrying males mate with wild females, their eggs don’t hatch, because Wolbachia prevents the paternal chromosome from forming properly. Since the species only lives 30 to 40 days in the wild, preventing them from reproducing can effectively wipe out local populations.

MosquitoMate only got permission to release what they’re calling the “Zap males” in 20 states and DC, because those are the places most similar in temperature and precipitation to Kentucky, New York and California where it held its tests. It plans to sell its “good guy bugs” to hotels, establishments and even homeowners through a summer-long subscription. While it’s unfortunate that most of the southeastern states are not included in the list, MosquitoMate is hoping to be able to release a different species all over the US.

Earlier this year, the startup unleashed 20,000 Wolbachia-carrying male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the Florida Keys as part of a trial. The fact that it was able to conduct tests in the Keys is promising enough, considering a UK firm called Oxitec failed to secure permission to test its genetically modified moquitoes in the area. Nevertheless, the EPA still has to approve MosquitoMate’s application to be able to use the species, a deadly vector of Zika, dengue and yellow fever, as a biopesticide nationwide.

Source: Nature