YouTube’s live TV starts streaming on Roku devices

Google is living up to its promise of making native YouTube TV apps available for the media hub of your choice. You can now add a YouTube TV channel on “select” Roku devices, giving you the service’s usual range of live broadcasts, a cloud DVR and the other perks of the cord cutter service. There isn’t any mention of Roku-specific features, but the allure is really the freedom to watch in your living room using a device explicitly meant for a laid-back viewing experience.

There’s no mention of how close the Apple TV app might be. However, Google had promised both that and the Roku app in early 2018. The chances are that you won’t have to wait long to watch however you like. That’s crucial for a live TV offering that’s growing quickly, but still has a small-enough base that added support could be a big deal.

Source: Roku

Flash storage spec doubles speeds on future smartphones

Smartphones already have storage speeds that rival PCs and they’re going to take another big leap soon. Standards group JEDEC has unveiled UFS 3.0, a new flash storage standard for mobile devices, Chromebooks, VR headsets and automotive devices that doubles the bandwidth of UFS 2.1 to a stellar 2.9 GB/s. That’s only a theoretical maximum that real-world devices won’t likely reach, however, and requires that the host device has the hardware to support it.

UFS 3.0 also lowers flash power consumption and increases reliability in a wide ranger of temperature conditions, a bonus for vehicle applications. It does all this thanks to lower voltage requirements that support the latest types of NAND, a refresh function that increases reliability, and double the speeds per lane (from 5.8 to 11.6 Gbps with a maximum of two lanes).

Such speeds might seem crazily unnecessarily, but they would let you do things like capture 4K at 60 fps or even 8K without stressing your phone. And as Samsung, for one, has promised new 512GB storage modules for its next-gen phones, you’re going to want to transfer all that data as fast as possible.

Just because there’s a new standard doesn’t mean your next phone will have it, for course — UFS 3.0 might take a while for companies to implement. Samsung devices might be among the first to see chips and controllers using it, as Samsung is far and away the biggest NAND manufacturer in the world.

Source: JEDEC

India Announces Latest Tax Increase on Imported Smartphones, Including iPhone

India is preparing to raise its customs duty on imported mobile phones — including Apple’s iPhone models besides the iPhone SE — from a previous standard of 15 percent to 20 percent (via Bloomberg). The latest tax hike for imported iPhones comes under two months after the last one, which saw the taxes on imported mobile phones increase from 10 percent to 15 percent.

Like the previous increase, the new raise on taxes for imported smartphones is a move by the Indian government to promote India’s domestic manufacturing and get more companies to build products within the country. While Apple has set up an iPhone SE assembly in India, and is looking into doing the same for the iPhone 6s, this further increase is yet another setback for Apple’s expansion in India.

India is raising custom duties on imported mobile phones to 20 percent from 15 percent, a bid to promote domestic manufacturing that may hurt Apple Inc.’s ability to compete in the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market.

The iPhone maker has been seeking to expand its presence in India and has negotiated with the government for lower tariffs on certain components. But the latest duties — part of a budget unveiled Thursday — show the country moving in the opposite direction.

The raise is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s long-running Make in India program, aimed at getting foreign companies to build more manufacturing and assembly operations in India. At the time of the 15 percent tax on imported smartphones, the price of iPhone models rose by about 3.5 percent across the board (excluding the Bangalore-built iPhone SE). The most expensive model, a 256GB iPhone X, cost 105,720 rupees ($1,646), up from 102,000 rupees ($1,593).

As most of Apple’s hardware becomes more expensive in India, users of the company’s software in the country spoke about the poor performance of services like Apple Maps and Siri. One user in Bangalore, Mihir Sharma, told CNBC that “Apple Maps is a joke in India,” and many users reported that Siri “often struggles” to make sense and correctly respond to Indian accents. Analyst Faisal Kawoosa said, “There is no denial that the Apple ecosystem isn’t aligned much to the usage and value of Indian users,” and until Apple can expand its footprint in India most customers believe it will stay that way.

Tag: India
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eBay Details Plans to Replace PayPal as Main Payments Processor With New Partner Adyen

eBay this week announced major changes coming for both buyers and sellers on its online marketplace, with a plan to phase out its 15-year-long partnership with PayPal and eventually integrate Amsterdam-based payments company Adyen as its “primary partner for payments processing globally” (via Recode). This will eventually affect all eBay customers on every version of the site, including desktop and its iOS and Android apps.

The process will happen over a long period of time, beginning with payments intermediation on its marketplace — essentially helping sellers and buyers transition to Adyen — in the second half of 2018. This will be a “small scale” initial expansion, and grow further throughout 2019. eBay currently has an operating agreement to keep PayPal as its primary payments processor through mid-2020, so the plan is to have “transitioned a majority” of its marketplace customers to Adyen by 2021.

After that time, PayPal will be relegated to a secondary checkout option for customers until July 2023. Following that transition it’s unclear whether eBay and PayPal’s partnership will end completely, or if the payments company will simply continue as a secondary option in checkout.

For Adyen, eBay noted that there will be “additional payments-related data” required to transition to the new platform, with these steps “required” to continue selling on eBay. Still, the company ensured that most of the ways that buyers and sellers pay for and receive money on the site will “be very similar” to how it worked with PayPal.

The way that sellers engage with eBay in an intermediated landscape will, for the most part, be very similar as they do today. For example, sellers will not need to change their accounts with eBay. Sellers will continue to log into eBay and manage their listings as they do today. As eBay begins to intermediate payments, sellers can expect to see new, streamlined dashboards and reports inclusive of payments – all within eBay.

eBay said customers will benefit from this shift in multiple ways, including lower costs of payments processing for sellers, as well as a simplified pricing structure and “more predictable access” to funds. Buyers will have more payment options, which eBay hopes will increase checkouts on the site. Additionally, because Adyen focuses solely on providing back-end payments services and will not link out to a secondary website, eBay said it will now “manage the entire checkout experience” so the payment process can be more streamlined.

PayPal became eBay’s main payments provider in 2003, following eBay’s acquisition of PayPal a year prior at $1.5 billion. In 2015, the companies split to become separate public companies, but agreed upon a deal that keeps PayPal as its primary payments provider for five years, through 2020. For PayPal, the company has been expanding its own reach in online payments over the past year, allowing friends to pay one another in Facebook Messenger and introducing Venmo as an online payment option at more than two million retailer websites last October.

Ahead of the launch of Apple Pay Cash — which works like Venmo in letting users pay one another through an app — PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said he didn’t think Apple’s peer-to-peer payments platform would hurt Venmo because of Venmo’s availability across ecosystems. “We’re technology agnostic,” Shulman said at the time, emphasizing that this provides the PayPal-owned company a “powerful advantage” over rival P2P platforms.

Tags: eBay, PayPal, Adyen
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Apple Confirms HomePod’s Supported Audio Sources in Tech Specs

Apple today updated its HomePod tech specs page with a new Audio Sources section that lists all of the ways in which the speaker can stream audio, setting the record straight on some conflicting information.

• Apple Music: HomePod users can ask Siri to play any of over 45 million songs available on Apple Music. A subscription is required.

• iTunes Music: HomePod users can ask Siri to play any songs, albums, or audiobooks purchased from the iTunes Store.

• iCloud Music Library: HomePod users can ask Siri to play any songs uploaded to a user’s iCloud Music Library, including songs imported from other sources such as CDs, with an Apple Music or iTunes Match subscription.

• Beats 1: HomePod users can ask Siri to play Apple’s official radio station.

• Podcasts: HomePod users can ask Siri to play any podcast episodes from the iTunes podcast directory.

• AirPlay: HomePod users can use AirPlay to play other audio from an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV, and Mac. AirPlay 2, coming later this year, is only required to stream audio from these sources to multiple HomePods.
Earlier this week, iMore’s Serenity Caldwell put together a useful breakdown with more detailed information about how the HomePod works with Apple Music, iTunes Match, iCloud Music Library, AirPlay, and more.

HomePod orders began last week ahead of the speaker’s official launch on February 9 in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.

Related Roundup: HomePodTags: AirPlay, Podcasts, iTunes Match, Beats 1, iCloud Music Library
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Gawker’s journalism will be preserved online

When a billionaire bankrolls lawsuits to shut down a news outlet that they don’t like, it’s a pretty big deal for how we treat journalism. It’s why the Freedom of the Press Foundation has announced that it will launch an online archive for news sites, starting with Gawker. The project, in partnership with the Internet Archive, has crawled every page of the disputed site, as well as others like the L.A. Weekly, for preservation.

Parker Higgins, the foundation’s director of special projects, explains that certain news outlets are at risk for what he calls the “billionaire problem.” This is where members of the super rich can use their financial muscle to censor politically or personally inconvenient material. Gawker, famously, earned the ire of one prominent venture capitalist after broadcasting details of their sexuality without consent.

Univision purchased the Gizmodo Media Group, which contained the other sites in Gawker’s stable, but the main site itself is up for auction. Reported buyers include at least one individual who feels they were initially wronged by the outlet, and it’s likely that other rich dudes with a grudge have also made bids.

Similarly, the L.A. Weekly, which was bought by an initially-secret consortium and laid off the bulk of its workforce, removed at least one news story about the purchase. Thankfully, the reports remain publicly available on Archive It’s Threatened Outlets section, part of the new collection. In addition, L.A. Weekly staffers have found older articles being republished with fresh dates, verifiable using the archive.

Other sites have also suffered the “billionaire problem,” like when Joe Ricketts, owner of DNAinfo, shut down Gothamist and its sister publications after its staff voted to unionize. Similarly, the Toast will soon be expunged from the internet for as-yet undisclosed reasons.

The foundation’s preservation of the Gawker archives will, it’s hoped, reduce the temptation for other wealthy folks to suppress online reporting. After all, it’s much harder to scrub inconvenient truths from the internet if they’re being duplicated in a public archive.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Freedom of the Press Foundation

Apple Pulls Telegram Messenger From App Store for ‘Inappropriate Content’

Apple has pulled popular encrypted messenger app Telegram from the App Store, following reports of “inappropriate content” hosted on the platform that violated Apple’s developer guidelines for iOS apps.

Users first noted Telegram’s absence late on Wednesday via Reddit, after App Store searches for the app began returning results for Viber, Skype, and Messenger instead. Both the original app and experimental offshoot Telegram X still don’t appear on the App Store at the time of writing.

The exact reason for the apps’ removal isn’t yet clear, but Telegram founder Pavel Durov responded to a tweet on Thursday by explaining that the company was alerted by Apple to “inappropriate content” made available to users of both apps, which led to them being pulled.

We were alerted by Apple that inappropriate content was made available to our users and both apps were taken off the App Store. Once we have protections in place we expect the apps to be back on the App Store.

— Pavel Durov (@durov) February 1, 2018

Apple’s review guidelines include a section on user safety that prohibits “upsetting or offensive content”, while a sub-section covering user-generated content requires that the relevant apps include:

• A method for filtering objectionable material from being posted to the app
• A mechanism to report offensive content and timely responses to concerns
• The ability to block abusive users from the service
• Published contact information so users can easily reach you

Apps with user-generated content or services that end up being used primarily for pornographic content, objectification of real people (e.g. “hot-or-not” voting), making physical threats, or bullying do not belong on the App Store and may be removed without notice.

We’ll update this post if we hear more details on the situation.

Tag: Telegram
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UK group planning complex 200-mile autonomous car trial

As the UK attempts to position itself at the forefront of autonomous driving, the government — with help from startups and universities — has embarked on a number of trials in order to rack up the necessary miles on the road. This normally involves putting a self-driving through the small patches of the best and worst British highways have to have offer, providing car makers with the data they need to manufacture a safe autonomous vehicle and pave the way for updated laws and regulations in order to govern them.

The new HumanDrive initiative, announced today, is another of those driverless trials, but this one wants to be a little more thorough than those that have come before it. A self-driving car will embark on the “most complex autonomously controlled journey” ever attempted in the UK, taking in country roads, A-roads, motorways, high-speed roundabouts and various driving scenarios that are mostly unique to British roads. Overall, the vehicle will travel over 200 miles performing its duties.

The project is being led by Nissan’s European Technical Centre, with help from a wide variety of companies and organisations, including Hitachi, Transport Systems Catapult (which led the first UK driverless trial in 2016), Cranfield University, University of Leeds, HORIBA MIRA, Atkins, Aimsun Ltd, SBD Automotive and Highways England.

Various companies — including Nissan — are already testing autonomous vehicles in the UK, but HumanDrive wants its car to drive more like a human, providing a “an enhanced experience” for the people inside the car. By law, self-driving vehicles require a human rider in the driving seat, just in case something was to go wrong.

“The artificial driver model (controlling perception and decision making) will pilot the vehicle, and will be developed using the latest artificial intelligence technologies,” said Catapult Transport Systems in a statement. “Before being introduced to UK roads, the system will be developed and subjected to robust testing using a range of facilities, including simulation, hardware in the loop, private test track and small sections of public roads.”

Via: BBC News

Source: Transport Systems Catapult

Waymo drove 2 million autonomous miles in 2017

Waymo’s vehicles drove 2 million miles in self-driving mode across 25 cities in 2017, putting its total autonomous miles to 4 million. It accelerated its testing to prepare for its ride-hailing fleet’s launch this year, allowing it to “gather as much data as possible in order to improve [its] technology.” According to its annual report submitted to the government of California, Waymo drove 352,545 of those miles in The Golden State from December 2016 to November 2017. Within that period, the company reported a total of 63 disengagements (instances wherein the human test driver had to step in), which means its vehicles drove an average of 5,595 miles for every disengagement.

While its disengagement rate only fell 0.02 points from 0.20 to 0.18 over the twelve-month period, all these numbers indicate that Waymo is still ahead of its peers. It’s done the most extensive testing among all the companies with California permits, and as The Atlantic noted, only GM’s Cruise division comes close when it comes to autonomous mileage. Cruise vehicles racked up 125,000 miles on San Francisco’s streets without the help of a human driver and reported a yearly average of 1,254 miles per disengagement. We’re guessing GM also has plans to expand its testing efforts this year, considering it’s aiming to start selling cars without steering wheels in 2019.

Among all the causes of disengagement Waymo mentioned, “unwanted maneuver of the vehicle” topped the list with 19 instances, followed by “perception discrepancy” with 16. It’s worth noting, however, that most of those instances happened in the earlier part of the 12-month period, suggesting that the company’s technology improved tremendously in the second half of 2017.

Source: Waymo

Bungie’s ‘Destiny 2’ roadmap is designed to win back players

Destiny 2 fans haven’t given Bungie an easy ride. After rolling out a free trial in November, the team has been besieged with gripes about the game’s XP system, the now-infamous Prometheus Lens, and, increasingly, the fact that players are running out of content. As Twitch metrics show, engagement has been on the decline for months. Now, in a bid to reignite fan excitement, Bungie has released a pretty comprehensive development roadmap.

Every feature in the roadmap “will be delivered to every player of Destiny 2,” writes game director Christopher Barrett. “Some of these delivery dates may change, but everything you see listed here is being worked on the by the team. While there are larger projects in development, these are the game enhancements you’ll find in your immediate future. If any of these deployments change, we’ll let you know.”

Some of these features have already been discussed by Bungie, others are new additions, such as a public chat function (although they may come to regret that), better rewards, private matches and a 6v6 Iron Banner mode, plus others. The Sandbox update is slated for 27 March — this is the team responsible for the way weapons and abilities work in the game, and one that has faced a lot of community griping in recent times. Tweaks here might help recover some of the lapsed player base, but with at least two months to go, that might not be soon enough.

Source: Bungie.net