Google poaches a key Apple chip designer

Google is still snapping up Apple’s chip design talent as part of its ongoing quest to create custom processors. The Information has learned that the search giant has hired John Bruno, the designer who founded and ran Apple’s silicon competitive analysis group — that is, the team that helped iPhone and iPad processors stay ahead of rivals. It’s not certain what he’ll be doing at Google (his LinkedIn profile lists him only as a “System Architect”), but he started at graphics veteran ATI and rose to become a chief engineer at AMD, where he led the design of Fusion processors.

It’s reasonable to presume that the influx of new talent (which also includes veterans from Qualcomm) will be used to expand Google’s variety of custom processors. Right now, its only in-house silicon is the Pixel Visual Core imaging chip inside the Pixel 2. The question is just what Google will do with Bruno and others. It’s tempting to assume that its next step is a full-fledged CPU for its phones, especially given Bruno’s background in graphics but it could also produce other specialized chips (such as AI accelerators or display controllers).

Whatever Bruno works on, it’s evident that Google is committed to giving its phones (and possibly other devices) hardware that stands out. It’s not hard to see why it would go that route. Up until the Pixel 2, Google’s Pixel and Nexus phones only occasionally stood out hardware-wise and frequently used parts you could find in competing models. You bought them mainly for the software (such as pure Android or the Pixel’s HDR+ camera mode), and any hardware perks were just gravy. If Google can design chips that are genuinely faster or more efficient than what you find in competing products, you may have a good reason to choose a Pixel even if you only care about raw performance.

Source: The Information, LinkedIn

Amazon buys Blink in a bid to beef up its connected home lineup

Blink, the wire-free home monitoring system, has been acquired by Amazon. According to a release posted to Blink’s website, nothing will change for its customers at the moment. The company will continue to operate and support its products as per usual.

Right now, Blink offers an indoor and an outdoor home security camera, as well as a video doorbell. A home security system is available for preorder. The company got its start thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $1 million, and it’s known for offering wire-free products that have simple installation procedures and operate on regular batteries.

It’s not a surprising move for Amazon; after all, the company introduced the Cloud Cam just a couple of months ago. Additionally, its “Key” allows drivers to unlock your door and drop off packages inside your home. Clearly, with Alexa and its Echo line, the company is looking to extend its domination into the home security market.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Blink

OkCupid’s dating profiles will soon push for a ‘real’ name

OkCupid is clearly eager to cast off many dating site traditions. Next on the chopping block: usernames. The service has announced that it will require “real” first names in dating profiles (in a tweet it said “You do not need to use your government name or even your full first name”), starting now with an initial test group and rolling out to everyone over time. As the company explains, it doesn’t want the real you to be “hidden beneath another layer of mystique” — it figures that your profile should offer insight into your personality, not your handle.

To some extent, OkCupid is just joining the modern era. Numerous other dating apps require your first name, so you’re not left wondering how to address someone when you meet them in person. And of course, creeps may be more willing to message you if they can hide behind an alias.

However, the decision reduces your chances to maintain your anonymity. Real first names theoretically make it easier for harassers to track people down or attack them based on their gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Facebook’s initial approach to real names created serious problems for women, the LGBT community and others who are trying to avoid harassers, stalkers and bigots.

OkCupid tells Engadget that it takes privacy “very seriously” and notes that it has taken some steps to make it difficult to creep on others, such as removing profiles from its Google search index. It also reiterates that it’s not asking for anything more than your first name, and that you can use a nickname if you prefer. You still have some wiggle room to remain elusive. Even so, the policy shift gives you one less place where you can completely mask who you are until you’re comfortable revealing more.

We love our members. You do not need to use your government name or even your full first name. Use the name, nickname, or initials you’d like your date to call you on OkCupid.

— OkCupid (@okcupid) December 22, 2017

Source: OkCupid (Medium)

Russian hackers have been targeting journalists since 2014

The hacker group called Fancy Bear (which has been linked to Russian intelligence agency GRU) has been accused of the leaking of the Democratic National Convention emails, the distribution of malware that hijaked Ukranian artillery guns, phishing campaign that used a combination of two zero-day exploits found in Adobe Flash and Windows and an attack not only on German parliament but also the recent German and French elections. So no one should be surprised by the latest report that Fancy Bear has been targeting journalists.

According to an AP report, the hackers have been targeting Russian, Ukranian, Moldova, the Baltics and American journalists since 2014. The New York Times was a huge target for the group with phishing campaigns aimed at 50 of the publication’s reporters. Cybersecurity firm Secureworks obtained a list of journalists targeted by the group which included those at the NYT.

The AP reports that at least 200 reporters were in Fancy Bears crosshairs between 2014 and a few months ago. One was Russian television anchor Pavel Lobkov who was hacked and his private Facebook messages leaked to the public. Much the same way the DNC emails were leaked ahead of the 2016 US election.

The revelations that a hacking group that’s been linked to Russian intelligence has been going after political journalists both abroad and in the United States is just additional fodder for reports that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 US elections. The group is already known for hacking and disseminating emails from the DNC.

This is in addition to the thousands of Russia-linked inflammatory ads and promoted news stories that proved to be false that spread through Facebook ahead of the election. Throw in the special prosecutor’s investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government and the Fancy Bear attacks just seem like an just another cog in the machine meant to control US politics.

Source: AP

SpaceX Falcon 9 launch leaves a creepy cloud over LA

It seems like everyone in southern California is looking up and asking “what is that?” this evening, and after revelations earlier this week about government investigations into unidentified flying objects, UFO is a popular answer. In truth, the trails were left by a SpaceX launch in the last hour from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara, CA. You can watch a live video feed of the launch below.

Couldn’t have timed that better. Caught the @spacex launch from Vandenberg while flying the chopper. (Hashtag Blessed)

A post shared by Micah Muzio (@micahmuzio) on Dec 22, 2017 at 5:48pm PST

@spacex launch seen over the Valley! 🚀🚀

A post shared by Gillian Sheldon (@glamourous1) on Dec 22, 2017 at 5:33pm PST

Real-time electricity map shows the sources of the energy you use

If you’ve ever wondered where your electricity comes from, and how much carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted in order to get it to your plug, look no further than the simply named Electricity Map. A new online tool that aggregates import and export electricity data in real time, it’s able to show you the source of the electricity you use, as well as retrace the CO2 emissions based on the manner by which the electricity was produced at its origin.

“Coal power plants represent almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions,” Olivier Corradi, a French-Danish data scientist who leads the project, told Digital Trends. “Policies unfortunately tend to focus less on closing coal power plants and more on how much wind or solar was installed. We wanted to have an objective, quantified view about the true physical emissions related to electricity consumption in order to guide debates to something more constructive. We strongly believe information precedes action, and we have substantially been lacking information in public debates.”

When the project started a year ago, the researchers included only a few countries on the map. Since then, a community has formed around the open-source project, and its creators have been able to expand to multiple countries around the world. At present, Electricity Map covers Europe, most of Latin America, Australia, parts of India, and is currently in the process of expanding to include the United States (California is already up and running).

For each region, visitors can analyze electricity production by source and carbon emissions — with production broken down into wind, solar, hydro, hydro storage, battery storage, geothermal, biomass, nuclear, gas, coal, and oil categories. You can also identify the origin of electricity in the past 24 hours, carbon intensity during that time, and even rank the different countries to see which are doing best.

“We’re aiming to be the Google Maps of electricity, and our objective is to digitalize electricity fluxes around the world,” Corradi said.

If you’re at all interested in getting up-to-date information about how the power you use may be affecting the environment, this is totally worth checking out. Heck, you can also sign up to get involved yourself.

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With CRISPR, geneticists have a powerful new weapon in the battle against ALS

For many people today, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is most commonly linked with both the fundraising Ice Bucket Challenge and one its most famous patients, the physicist Stephen Hawking. However, it could soon have a brand-new distinction — the next disease to be treatable using CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology.

In work carried out by researchers at University of California, Berkeley, scientists have been able to disable the defective gene that triggers ALS in mice. While they didn’t get rid of the disease permanently, the treatment did extend the mice’s life span by 25 percent. The therapy delayed the onset of the muscle-wasting symptoms that characterize ALS, which ultimately become fatal when they spread to the muscles which control breathing.

“Some diseases, like Lou Gehrig’s disease, are caused by gene mutations that lead a protein in our cells to malfunction,” David Schaffer, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of the Berkeley Stem Cell Center, told Digital Trends. “A very promising approach is to disable or delete that mutated gene. CRISPR/Cas9 is a highly promising technology to do so, but this capability needs to be delivered to the target cells. We put together CRISPR-Cas9 with a highly promising gene delivery, based on a virus, in order to disable the disease causing gene SOD1 in an animal model of ALS.”

The mice in the study were genetically engineered to exhibit a mutated human gene that is responsible for around 20 percent of all inherited forms of ALS. The team then used a specially engineered virus that delivers a gene encoding the Cas9 protein, which in turn disabled the mutant gene responsible for ALS. The treated mice lived one month longer than the typical four-month life span of mice with ALS. An average healthy mouse lives for around two years.

Hopefully, were this to be carried over to humans, those time spans would be extended. “There are challenges that remain before extending into human studies, such as using an improved virus optimized for humans, but we think there is a clear path to doing so,” Schaffer said.

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Science Advances.

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Need a last-minute gift idea? Check out the hottest toys of 2017

Looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for the young (or the young at heart)? If you’re unclear as to what the hot toys are this year, we’ve scoured the web — and solicited a few suggestions from our staff — regarding some of the most popular toys and games this holiday season. Read on for our curated list, which includes gifts that will please friends and family of all ages, whether they’re into video games, gadgets, or getting their hands slimy.

Looking for a more robust list of picks? If so, take a gander at our 2017 Holiday Gift Guide.

Nintendo Switch ($300)

Nintendo’s most ambitious console yet offers the power of a home console in a device you can take with you anywhere. Suddenly, you can play the latest Zelda or Mario game while on your morning commute, and the sharp visuals blow up nicely when you hook the Switch up to a TV. Whether you’ve got kids, or simply love Nintendo’s reliable, fun-for-all-ages style of games, the Switch is a lovely device that’s chock-full of innovation and promise. It’s so cool, in fact, we officially dubbed it our Product of the Year.

Read our full Nintendo Switch review

Buy now from:

Amazon

‘Codenames’ ($15)

Board games are more popular than ever these days, and not just for family game night. A generation of young adults raised on Catan have led to a wave of games that are strategic, and often complex. For those who don’t want to manage an economy, Codenames offers a simple — but surprisingly deep — experience that anyone can grasp. Players sort into two teams, each consisting of a spymaster and spies. Tiles with words on them are arranged on the table, and the spymasters must give clues to lead their spies to their team’s tiles (hopefully without choosing the other team’s tiles). It’s an intuitive game, one that any group, from nuclear families to college friends, can enjoy.

Buy it now from:

Amazon

DIY Slime Kit ($20)

It seemed impossible for anything to dethrone fidget spinners as the decade’s strangest trend, yet slime did just that. Today’s social media personalities demonstrated that, with household items like Borax or shampoo, anyone could recreate the set of Nickelodeon’s Double Dare. If you’d prefer your kids not play with potentially harmful chemicals, however, why not buy a kit to keep them sliming it up safely?

Buy it now from:

Target

Epikgo Classic hoverboard ($600)

They say you should dress for the job you want, so if you want to be a Silicon Valley executive, try living life on a hoverboard. The Epikgo Classic is fun to ride and can go more than 10 miles on a single charge, and besides, the calories you save from walking can be put to better use designing the next app to disrupt [insert industry here].

Buy it now from:

Amazon

Power Wheels Boomerang ($330)

What kid doesn’t love to race? The Power Wheels Boomerang is a beastly, battery-powered vehicle that will let kids tear up the lawn in style — but don’t worry, it tops out at 5 miles per hour!

Buy it now from:

Toys R Us Amazon

Nerf Rival Nemesis Mark MXVII-10k

Nerf guns are an ageless gift, enjoyed equally by children in the park and employees at Digital Trends headquarters. Regardless of how you choose to use it, the pricey Nemesis Mark MXVII-10k will make you the power player in any Nerf war. With a 100-round capacity and a motorized feed that’s capable of shooting projectiles at 100 feet per second, you’ll lay waste to opponents like Achilles having a bad day.

Buy now from:

Amazon

Lego Star Wars BB-8

If there’s one character in the new Star War films who is universally loved, it’s BB-8, the world’s friendliest rolling orb. If you want to make your own BB-8, this Lego set makes it possible, with superb detail and even a display stand.

Buy it now from:

Amazon

Parrot Mambo drone ($130)

Although it’s not the flashiest drone in the world, this tiny quadcopter handles well and comes with a few fun attachments, including a claw for picking up objects and cannons for shooting foam balls. You can control it with a smartphone app, too, or spend a little more for a twin-stick controller. It’s one of our favorite drones to date, and also one of the most affordable.

Buy it now from:

Amazon

We strive to help our readers find the best deals on quality products and services, and choose what we cover carefully and independently. If you find a better price for a product listed here, or want to suggest one of your own, email us at dealsteam@digitaltrends.com.Digital Trends may earn commission on products purchased through our links, which supports the work we do for our readers.

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Edward Snowden’s Haven app turns your phone into a surveillance device

Haven’s not the first app of its kind, but it just might be the best.

A quick search on the Play Store will show no shortage of surveillance/motion detection apps, and while some of these work alright, they’re not nearly as secure compared to a true security camera. Haven: Keep Watch is a new app that falls into this same category, but it does something special that helps it stick out from the crowd.

For starters, Haven is created by The Guardian Project and Freedom of the Press Foundation – the latter of which has Edward Snowden serving as its president. Haven is described as being “for people who need a way to protect their personal spaces and possessions without compromising their own privacy”, and this is where things get interesting.

Unlike most surveillance applications that can only make use of your phone’s camera and microphone, Haven is able to tap into all of its on-device sensors so that it can detect motion, sound, light, and even vibrations. As if that wasn’t enough, Haven combines these sensors while leveraging the likes of Signal and Tor to keep everything as secure as possible.

You can use Haven to choose what kind of things you want it to detect while the app is running, meaning that you can turn off the camera if you just want to place your phone on a table or in a drawer to detect sound rather than video.

Haven will push notifications to your primary phone when it detects an intrusion/disturbance, and you can access your Haven Log remotely to view everything that your phone picked up throughout the night or day.

It’s obvious that a lot of thought’s gone into Haven, and that’s a good thing as The Guadian Project and Freedom of the Press Foundation created the app with human rights defenders and investigative journalists in mind.

Haven’s designed to be used on a burner phone that you don’t use every single day, and you can download it from the Play Store right now. There may still be some bugs here and there seeing as the app’s launching as part of a public beta, but initial reviews on are immensely positive.

Amazon buys smart doorbell and camera maker Blink

Elon Musk shows off the Tesla Roadster he’s prepping for space

When Elon Musk revealed his plans for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, he also promised the delivery of his own cherry-red Tesla Roadster to space, all while David Bowie’s Space Oddity plays. Not the most subtle of promotions, for sure. Now Musk is teasing us with an even more overblown set of seven photos that show said Roadster prepping to head into orbit near Mars.

The photoset on Musk’s Instagram account reminds everyone that test flights usually contain mass in the form of concrete or steel blocks to test load capacity. Instead, Musk decided to launch his own Roadster into an elliptical orbit around the sun, which he says should last a billion years. Which, obviously, may be a bit of hyperbole. Even still, this is some unforgettable imagery, which will likely burn itself into our collective minds as we think of Tesla, Musk or Space X. Which is probably the point.

A Red Car for the Red Planet Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring. Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel. The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit.

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Dec 22, 2017 at 10:47am PST

Source: Elon Musk (Instagram)