Jabra brings noise cancellation to its behind-the-neck earbuds

Do you like the concept of Apple’s BeatsX earbuds, but want something that’s better at shutting out external noise and taking phone calls? Jabra might have your fix. It’s expanding its Elite earbud line with the 65e, which brings active noise cancellation and higher-quality voice calls (through a three-mic array). It’s even promising that this won’t hurt your battery life. You should get 8 hours of listening with noise cancellation on, and 13 hours relying just on the passive cancellation of the in-ear design.

The Elite 65e be rain- and gym-ready thanks to IP54 dust and water resistance, and they’re relatively futureproof through Bluetooth 5.0. Jabra expects the earbuds to ship in April for $199 — $50 more than their most conspicuous rival, but potentially worthwhile if you’re tired of asking people to repeat themselves.

Source: Jabra

Facebook’s video app comes to Xbox One

Facebook is continuing its quest to make its video easier to watch in the living room. The company has released a version of its Video app for Xbox One that gives you an easy way to catch videos in between Sea of Thieves sessions. It’ll seem familiar if you’ve used previous apps, and blends both Facebook’s growing list of original shows with recommended videos and your friends’ shared clips. Not that there’s too much room to complain — this still makes it convenient to catch up without squinting at your phone or PC screen.

Via: Xbox (Twitter)

Source: Microsoft Store

Reddit bans communities trading firearms and drugs

Reddit’s bid to clean up its communities now includes what those communities trade. The social site has updated its policies to ban the trade of firearms, explosives, drugs (including alcohol and tobacco), services with “physical sexual contact,” stolen goods, personal info and counterfeits. Accordingly, Reddit has shut down numerous subreddits that either directly traded in these goods or were clearly meant to enable those exchanges, including r/gunsforsale, r/stealing (yes, it existed) and r/darknetmarkets.

The site also stressed that it doesn’t bear responsibility for transactions for those goods you are allowed to offer. Reddit was “not intended to be used as a marketplace,” and it’s your duty to be sure the other side of the deal is honest.

Reddit said the bans weren’t prompted by any specific actions on the part of the newly closed communities, and that it won’t take action against communities where trades aren’t the focus. However it comes amid widespread concern over easy access to guns in the wake of shootings. It’s safe to say the company would rather not be accused of enabling future tragedies or other crimes. There’s also the simple matter of Reddit’s bottom line: it doesn’t want to deter advertisers worried their campaigns will be attached to guns and drugs. What it loses in angry users it might make up in increased ad sales.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: Reddit

Best Buy has ‘ceased ordering’ Huawei smartphones

It’s not just carriers giving Huawei the cold shoulder in the US; retailers are, too. A CNET source has learned that Best Buy has “ceased ordering” new Huawei smartphones and will phase them out over a matter of weeks. Best Buy was the one who made the call, according to the claim. Best Buy’s spokeswoman wouldn’t confirm or deny the apparent scoop, but it said it changes its product offerings for a “variety of reasons.”

The move comes several weeks after AT&T and Verizon were said to have ditched Huawei phones under pressure from the American government, which is concerned that Huawei might use its devices to spy on behalf of China. There was a 2012 report accusing Huawei and ZTE of making devices that could pose a security threat, but it never mentioned smartphones and has never been supplemented with definitive evidence. It’s possible that Best Buy is facing similar heat, but there’s no confirmation that this is the case; it could also reflect a purely profit-oriented decision.

For its part, Huawei pointed out that had “earned the trust” of partners worldwide.

You can still buy Huawei’s phones online, including through Amazon, B&H and Newegg. However, the loss of Best Buy is bound to hurt even if those other options remain intact. Where Huawei once had hopes of making it big in the US, it now risks losing what few sales outlets it already had. You may have to go out of your way to buy that Mate 10 Pro in the near future.

Source: CNET

The next version of Chrome will block autoplaying videos with sound

With Chrome 64, Google began allowing users to stop videos from autoplaying on specific websites but with Chrome 66, the company is adding new criteria that dictate when videos can autoplay. As 9to5Google reports, in Google’s upcoming version of Chrome, there are a few conditions that must be met for media to autoplay on a website. It must be muted or not have audio, the user has to have tapped or clicked on the site while browsing, the site has to have been added to the Home Screen by the user on mobile or the user has to have frequently played media on that site if on desktop.

Chrome 66 is now in the beta channel and should be released in the next few weeks. Along with the new autoplay restrictions, Chrome 66 will also display warnings following crashes caused by third-party software injecting code and removes trust for Symantec certificates.

Via: 9to5Google

Source: Google

Mark Zuckerberg is sorry

Given the news that has broken over the last few days about the collection and use of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica, there’s been an expectation that the company’s leaders will speak out and tonight Mark Zuckerberg finally did. Following up on his Facebook post and rollout of some new rules and policy initiatives, the CEO granted a rare on-camera interview with CNN, and also spoke to others like Wired, the New York Times and Recode.

In the interviews, the first difference that jumps out is the presence of an actual apology for… something. As Zuckerberg said to Recode, “We let the community down and I feel really bad and I’m sorry about that.”

A statement that may have more lasting meaning is his response to a CNN question about whether or not Facebook should be regulated. Zuckerberg said “I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated,” and also referenced how the company’s reaction to “bad actors” who try to manipulate elections has changed. While in 2016 it was not as proactive, he pointed out Facebook’s use of AI tools during the French election and subsequent events around the world to detect and filter out the use of fake accounts.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he is “sure someone’s trying” to use Facebook to meddle with the US midterm elections. “There are going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of” https://t.co/W2WMtTnBpw pic.twitter.com/ooMGj3TfXR

— CNN (@CNN) March 22, 2018

.@LaurieSegallCNN: “Knowing what you know now, do you believe Facebook impacted the results of the 2016 election?”

Mark Zuckerberg: “Oh that’s — that is hard. You know, I think that it is — it’s really hard for me to have a full assessment of that.” https://t.co/m3F79UMHd8 pic.twitter.com/y41ON2LatL

— CNN (@CNN) March 22, 2018

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will proactively reach out and notify “anyone whose data might have been affected” by the massive Cambridge Analytica data breach. https://t.co/DojUEzPh5O pic.twitter.com/zbBOCpMDuR

— CNN (@CNN) March 22, 2018

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he is “happy to” testify before Congress “if it’s the right thing to do” https://t.co/QLmFe43vp2 pic.twitter.com/0UH7WVxqW9

— CNN (@CNN) March 22, 2018

Source: Wired, New York Times, Recode, CNN

Zuckerberg is ‘uncomfortable’ making content decisions for all users

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on multiple media outlets today to address the Cambridge Analytica scandal and to answer pressing questions about the increasingly large role Facebook plays in today’s world. In a particularly enlightening moment in a Re/Code interview, Zuckerberg expressed trepidation and discomfort in being the arbiter of what’s right, and what’s wrong.

“A lot of the most sensitive issues that we face today are conflicts between real values, right? Freedom of speech, and hate speech and offensive content. Where is the line?” he said to Re/Code. “What I would really like to do is find a way to get our policies set in a way that reflects the values of the community so I am not the one making those decisions.” Fundamentally, he said, he’s uncomfortable making content policy decisions for people around the world.

In another interview with the New York Times, Zuckerberg said these were the kinds of problems he didn’t envision when he first started the website back in 2004. “If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central things I’d need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each other’s elections, there’s no way I thought that’s what I’d be doing, if we talked in 2004 in my dorm room.”

Facebook has come under fire in recent months not only over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how foreign governments may have used the social network to influence the 2016 elections, but also for its seemingly callous attitude towards hate speech. Last year, ProPublica found that Facebook’s enforcing of its community standards were wildly inconsistent, where somehow white men were deemed as a more protected category than black children. Facebook has apologized for this since then, but it admits it’s still having trouble moderating sensitive material. Part of that issue, it seems, is because CEO Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to want to take a stand.

“[The] thing is like, ‘Where’s the line on hate speech?’ I mean, who chose me to be the person that did that?,” Zuckerberg said to Re/Code. “I guess I have to, because of [where we are] now, but I’d rather not.” Like it or not, however, it turns out that being the CEO of Facebook might actually mean making those decisions.

MIT’s ocean-exploring robotic fish takes a test swim through a Fiji reef

It’s often said that we know less about the ocean depths than we do about the surface of the moon. That fact was highlighted again this week when Smithsonian explorers published a paper about a new ocean reef zone, aptly called the rariphotic, where about half of the fish were previously undiscovered.

Even with 21st-century advances in small submersible vehicles, accessing and documenting marine life still proves to be a challenge. But now engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hope to have a solution with a soft robotic fish named SoFi, which they say can get closer to real fish by imitating their behavior.

“We’ve developed a soft robotic fish that mimics the movement of real fish and has now, for the first time, demonstrated an ability to swim alongside real fish in the actual ocean,” Robert Katzschmann, an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) doctoral candidate who lead the project, told Digital Trends. Katzschmann and his team think this is the first robot of its kind that can swim freely underwater.

From the outside, SoFi looks like a rather unassuming rubber fish but it’s what’s inside the robot that matters. Electronics, including sensors and a Linux pc, are packed within its brain case, urethane foam offers buoyancy, and a hydraulic pump near its chest helps move the tail. By pumping water alternatively into two ballon-shaped chambers, the robot’s tail bends back and forth, powering the robot along. A camera at the front records it’s journey through the water.

SoFi can be remote controlled via a waterproof Super Nintendo controller, adapted to communicate using ultrasonic signals. As it swims, it look a lot like a real fish gliding through the water — albeit a bit less gracefully. After testing the robot at Rainbow Reef in Fiji, the researchers said fish appeared to be unbothered by SoFi’s presence.

Moving forward the researchers want to make SoFi faster and more autonomous, with onboard sensors that allow it to follow other fish. Although SoFi would make a nifty toy, Katzschmann and his colleagues hope the technology finds more a professional applications, giving marine scientists and engineers better access to underwater worlds.

“The ability to more easily get water samples using robots would enable us to learn a lot more about more remote parts of the ocean,” he said. “Using them to inspect underwater infrastructure would allow for the more regular maintenance of hardware that may not otherwise be kept up to code … I could imagine one day being able to use several of these fish to record data from the ocean, including even taking water samples. I could also imagine SoFis someday being used for underwater inspection of critical infrastructure like oil rigs and pipelines.

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Love smoked meat? Scientists figured out how to make it better

Whether it’s meat, cheese or, heck, just about any other foodstuff, we are suckers when it comes to smoked food. There is a problem, though: The food-smoking process may add some delicious new flavors, but it also causes carcinogens, aka substances capable of causing cancer in living tissue. That’s something that no amount of tasty food is worth.

Fortunately, researchers from the U.K.’s University of Reading borrowed an insight from the automotive industry to come up with a solution. Presented this week at the 255th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), their approach involves running smoke through a zeolite filter, a porous aluminosilicate mineral which has been shown to be a promising method for purifying car exhaust gases. This filter helped remove up to 93 percent of benzo[a]pyrene, a known carcinogen in smoke.

“The smoking process can cause carcinogens to form in foods,” Dr. Jane Parker, one of the researchers on the project, said in a statement. “Not all smoked foods are dangerous, but we do know most can contain low levels of these substances, so we should try to remove them. If we could produce a smoke with fewer carcinogens, but that still has the same great taste, that would be ideal. Zeolite filters, which are put in a tailpipe, have been used in the car industry to reduce environmental pollutants, but they haven’t been applied to food yet. We want to change that.”

Reducing the number of carcinogens in smoke is good news. Almost as exciting, however, is the impact that the filter has on the taste of the finished smoked foods: It actually improves it. According to the researchers, using a zeolite filter to remove harmful compounds in the smoke gave the finished food a superior smokey flavor.

When a panel of expert tasters tried out food prepared with the new, improved smoking technique, they agreed that the filtered smoke resulted in a more rounded, balanced flavor — described as offering a similar aroma to a “Christmas ham.” Foods made using the traditional unfiltered smoke were meanwhile more likely to score higher in categories like “ashtray” and “acrid smoke.” One theory for the taste difference is that the zeolite filter is filtering out the smoke’s larger molecules, which may be the ones giving some smoked food their harsher flavors and smell.

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LED baseball cap fools facial-recognition tech into thinking you’re someone else

Zhe Zhou

There’s a constant push and pull when it comes to new security-related technologies. Researchers will invent a new security system, only to have others find a way of circumventing it, before still others come along and find a way to further strengthen it. That’s a vicious cycle and it certainly applies to facial-recognition software, which is now widely used in everything from airport security to unlocking our iPhone X handsets.

A new project carried out by researchers in China threatens to undermine it, however, through the creation of an LED-studded baseball cap, which is able to trick facial-recognition systems into thinking that you are another person entirely. The smart (but scary) hack involves projecting infrared dots of light onto a person’s face, which are then detected by facial-recognition cameras and wrongly interpreted as facial details. In a demo, the researchers were able to fool facial-recognition cameras into thinking that a person was someone else (including the singer Moby) with more than 70 percent accuracy.

“Through launching this kind of attack, an attacker not only can dodge surveillance cameras; more importantly, he can impersonate his target victim and pass the face authentication system, if only the victim’s photo is acquired by the attacker,” the researchers write in a publicly available paper. “… The attack is totally unobservable by nearby people, because not only is the light invisible, but also the device we made to launch the attack is small enough. According to our study on a large data set, attackers have … [an] over 70 percent success rate for finding such an adversarial example that can be implemented by infrared.”

This isn’t the only similar example of so-called “adversarial objects” we’ve come across. Previously we’ve covered adversarial glasses that are able to render people unrecognizable to facial recognition, and a way of altering textures on a 3- printed object to make, for instance, image-recognition systems identify a 3D-printed turtle as a rifle.

While the latest China-based study hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and therefore we can’t vouch for the results, it seems that more and more examples are highlighting the potential weaknesses of computational image recognition.

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