Canon takes on RED with its first full-frame cinema camera

Canon has unveiled its first full-frame cinema camera with some nice features and — if it’s serious about taking on rivals like RED and Arri — some major omissions. The C700 FF has a 5.9K sensor (5,952 x 3,140, or 18.7 megaxpixels), and can capture 10-bit DCI 4K (4,096 x 2,160) internally in ProRes by downsampling the entire sensor. You can also capture 5.9K RAW, but there’s a big gotcha: You must purchase Canon’s optional Codex CDX-36150 external recorder.

Canon promises a very decent 15 stops of dynamic range and a wide color gamut that conforms to top-flight cinema standards (ITU-R BT.2020). It supports internal 4K capture in ProRes or Canon’s XF-AVC format via CFast cards, and offers minimal moire and noise, even at higher ISO settings, thanks to the sensor oversampling. The optional Codex recorder supports up to 12-bit RAW files on 1TB or 2TB capture drives.

With a 17:9 ratio sensor, the C700 FF supports Super 35mm, Super 16mm and anamorphic modes. As such, it can be used either with full-frame Canon lenses or PL-mount and other lenses with a smaller image circle. Other features include Canon’s excellent Dual Pixel phase-detect autofocus, HDR via a Log2 shooting mode, the ability to capture proxies when recording RAW video, and up to 168 fps slow-motion in 2K mode. (With the Codex external recorder, you can shoot 5.9K at 60 fps and 4K at 72 fps.)

Canon is taking a risk by selling the C700 FF without the external recorder (there’s no price on that yet), considering the camera alone costs a whopping $33,000. For a fair amount less, you could get RED’s new Epic-W Gemini 5K S35 camera base package, and for a bit more, the Epic-W 8K Helium, also with the base package. Both of those cameras have smaller Super 35 sensors, but both offer native RAW video out of the box.

Despite the $33,000 price tag, though, the C700 FF is one of the cheaper full-frame cinema cameras on the market. Its excellent Dual Pixel autofocus, which trumps all other AF systems on the market, will also tempt independent and documentary filmmakers. Canon is no doubt hoping that potential buyers can live without RAW, “settling” for 10-bit ProRes with data rates up to 810 Mbps, more than double what Panasonic’s GH5s can do. That’s a decent gamble, because many cinematic releases were shot and conformed in ProRes, not RAW, on the original Arri Alexa camera.

Source: Canon

GoPro’s $199 Hero action camera is meant for newcomers

GoPro’s action camera lineup has skewed toward the enthusiast side for a while — you get a Hero6 because you intend to document your bike rides and surfing expeditions. Now, however, GoPro is ready to court more first-timers. It’s releasing a $199 Hero (no number, just “Hero”) meant for beginners and occasional users who’d rather not spend a fortune and passed on the similarly priced but relatively niche Hero5 Session. There’s no 4K or similar high-end features (you’re limited to 1440p at 60 frames per second), but GoPro is betting you won’t mind.

Instead, the focus is on ease of use: you get a 2-inch touchscreen with “streamlined” capture options, voice control and WiFi syncing with your phone. You can also expect virtually mandatory features like 30-foot water resistance, stabilization and support for GoPro’s usual mounting accessories. The new Hero is available worldwide as of today.

We’ve technically been here before, as GoPro had plainly-titled Hero cameras a few years ago. However, the revival makes sense in light of GoPro’s current situation. The company’s sales are hurting to the point where it’s licensing its technology to supplement its core business. A more affordable camera could not only give those sales a short-term boost, but help GoPro in the long run by prompting upgrades to higher-end models in the long run.

Source: GoPro

Report: Cambridge Analytica hasn’t deleted all of its collected data

According to Cambridge Analytica, it already deleted the Facebook data it collected from 50 million users years ago — it even announced that it’s undertaking a third-party audit to verify that claim. Based on a new report by UK broadcaster Channel 4, though, that might not be true at all. The broadcaster says it has discovered a cache of the data CA harvested, and it contains information on 136,000 individuals from Colorado, including their personality results and psychological profiles created from the info the firm collected.

The information in the cache Channel 4 saw was gathered a few years ago, dating as far back as 2014, which is in line with CA’s data collection timeframe. Channel 4’s source said Colorado Republicans used that data set to target voters in the state. They also said that the list is known to have been “passed around using generic, non-corporate email systems, outside of the servers of Cambridge Analytica, and linked company SCL.” If the broadcaster’s report is true, that means a lot of people might have access to the list, and it’s probably impossible to make sure it’s removed from circulation.

The people whose data are included in the cache are obviously unhappy to find out that their info is out there. Cambridge Analytica, however, continues to insist that it deleted the data it gathered from the 270,000 people who installed the “thisisyourdigitallife” Facebook app and all their friends. A spokesperson from the firm told Channel 4:

“We have never passed any data from GSR to an external party. After Facebook contacted us in December 2015 we deleted all GSR (Global Science Research, the research company that had obtained the data for CA) data and took appropriate steps to ensure that any copies of the data were deleted. This includes our lawyers taking action in late 2014 against a number of former staff members who had stolen data and intellectual property from the company. These former staff members each signed an undertaking promising that they had deleted all such material. It is untrue that we failed to take appropriate measures to ensure that GSR data were deleted.”

Source: Channel 4 News

ARKit-Only Apps Exceed 13M Global Downloads Since Launch as Games Remain Most Popular Category

Since ARKit debuted within iOS 11 on September 19 last year, iPhone and iPad owners worldwide have downloaded and installed more than 13 million ARKit-only apps. The data comes from Sensor Tower, which broke down the most popular categories of augmented reality apps fueled by ARKit, the top 10 free and paid apps, highest grossing apps, and more.

Games remain the dominant category for ARKit-only apps — or those apps built “expressly using” Apple’s framework — having grown from representing 35 percent of downloads one month after iOS 11’s launch, to 47 percent today. The second place category, Utilities, decreased from 19 percent last October to 15 percent in March. Rounding out the top six were Entertainment, Lifestyle, Photo & Video, and Education.

Charts via Sensor Tower
Sensor Tower pointed out that for the games-specific charts, the top spots of all three sections (free, paid, grossing) were “still occupied by many of the same titles that found success several months ago,” suggesting not much variation in ARKit-only gaming on the App Store. On the other hand, when the researchers looked at non-game apps they saw multiple newcomers rising on the charts, like LEGO AR Studio — “a testament to the popularity of kid-focused AR content on the App Store thus far.”

From what we’ve seen in our latest analysis, ARKit-only apps only continue to grow in terms of installs and the number of experiences available to users. This isn’t including the numerous ARKit-compatible apps that have added some degree of AR functionality in the past six months and have pushed the number of AR apps on the App Store well beyond 2,000 to date.

There’s clearly substantial room for growth in terms of user base and revenue, but also ambition when it comes to this burgeoning category, and the apps above have built a solid foundation for what’s to come, especially as the capabilities of ARKit evolve and expand with future versions of iOS.

Popular free game “AR Dragon” retained the top spot as the most-downloaded free ARKit-only app and game during the framework’s first six months of availability. Other augmented reality apps that remain popular on the App Store include IKEA Place (#2 free apps), AR MeasureKit (#5 free apps/#5 top grossing), and CamToPlan Pro (#1 paid apps). For both paid and grossing categories, ARKit app downloads are leaning “predominantly” to the Utilities category.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has described augmented reality as “profound” in the past, claiming that Apple is in a “unique position” to lead when it comes to the technology. He thinks that AR will become “as key as having a website” for brands, and sees ARKit as the start of something much bigger: “This is very much like in 2008 when we fired the gun in the App Store. That’s what it feels like to me and I think it will just get bigger from here.”

Tags: Sensor Tower, ARKit
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Ashley Madison attempts to regain the public’s trust

Ashley Madison, the website for “married dating”, wants the public to know that it’s changed its ways.

It’s been a little under three years since the dating service for extra-marital affairs was hacked by a group calling itself the Impact Team, exposing the personal data and billing information of over 30 million customers — including users who spent $19 on a “paid delete” option for their accounts.

The fallout included a $11.2 million settlement with US victims and an additional Federal Trade Commission fine of $1.6 million. An Australian radio show outed a cheating husband to his wife on-air and a married New Orleans pastor committed suicide after he was discovered on the site. The massive data breach cost parent company Avid Life Media a quarter of its revenue, according to executives at the time (it’s now renamed Ruby Life, and also owns Cougar Life as well as sugar daddy dating website Established Men). Plans for a reported IPO on the London Stock Exchange just months before the hack — with the company valuing itself at $1 billion — were scuppered.

Now, Ruben Buell, who became CTO at Ruby Life in February 2017 and took the reins as president last April, is looking to regain public trust.

“We want to let people know that Ashley is here, Ashley is strong as ever,” said Buell in an interview with Engadget. “Yes, there was an incident in 2015 that was extremely unfortunate, and that the firm has learnt from that, grown from that and moved on.”

The company had attempted to keep a low profile and tame its branding — “Life is short. Have an affair” became “Find your moment” — after the hack. This week, the Toronto-based Buell is making the media rounds, armed with a new independent Ernst & Young report showing 5.7 million new accounts on the site in 2017 and a ratio of 1.13 active females for every active male on the site. The company is doubling down on its core purpose: facilitating infidelity. The infamous slogan is back.

“Ashley’s been the leader in the married dating space, the infidelity space, for a very long time now, and that is what we focused on [last year],” said Buell.

“We want to let people know that Ashley is here, Ashley is strong as ever.”

The company claims to have registered 54 million accounts since 2002, but this does not reflect the current number of active accounts, as many were deleted following the 2015 hack. According to Buell, there are 191,000 daily active users (defined as members who have exchanged messages) and 1.4 million new connections made each month.

Last year was the first since the hack that Ashley Madison saw “substantial growth” in its user base, Buell said, adding that its 2017 revenue grew 5 percent globally and 16.7 percent in the US compared to 2016. He declined to state the privately-held Ruby Life’s 2017 revenue figures or profits, but in a July 2016 Reuters interview, former president James Millership said it expected about $80 million in revenue that year, with a 35 to 40 percent EBITDA margin (a measure of profits, standing for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization). “The firm has always been very profitable and we continue to enjoy nice profits,” said Buell.

Ashley Madison is essentially trying to reestablish trust in a business that’s entirely dependent on discretion. But post-Cambridge Analytica, post-Snowden, post-data breaches of LinkedIn and Yahoo (which is owned by Engadget’s parent company, Verizon), the public is even more skeptical about data privacy than it was three years ago.

Making any comeback tougher was the revelation that the site was riddled with female bots to draw in male users, which formed part of the FTC probe. Women can use Ashley Madison for free, but even after connecting on the site, men have to pay “credits” to kick off a conversation. The website’s fake females essentially lured them into spending money to talk to no one. The Ernst & Young report also verifies that the bots are gone.

Buell attributes the company’s growth to targeting “attached” users — those in committed relationships — who are mostly in their forties and form 70 percent of Ashley Madison’s customers. Brazil, the company’s new report claims, saw an average of 138,865 new members per month in 2017, second only to the US. This year, Buell intends to expand in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

Buell has an ironic rationale that affairs can be good for a relationship. “There is a better way to have an affair,” he said. The logic: many couples are in sexless couplings but want to maintain their family; there’s a disconnect between divorce being socially acceptable while non-monogamy is not; a discreet, anonymous dating platform allows users to take their roaming out of the workplace, which is Ashley Madison’s “number one competitor.” “Don’t put your career at risk along with your marriage,” he said.

“A lot of these women are looking to stray because they want to stay in their marriages. So they’re looking at ‘well I have the option of divorce or I have the option of having an affair but I’m not real happy just continuing in my daily life as things are now,’” he said, citing surveys Ashley Madison has done with its users. “They find once they meet a lot of these desires that they come back into the marriage happier, revitalized, and can be a better wife.”

Even if your partner consents to extra-marital engagements, these relationships require privacy, according to Buell, since on commonly-used apps like Tinder, couples may face judgement when spotted by acquaintances. “It still isn’t generally social acceptable,” Buell said. “Which we think is ridiculous, honestly.”

“Ashley’s core differentiator is discretion.”

Yet this imperative for privacy is precisely why regaining the public trust is going to be an uphill battle for the infidelity website.

According to the FTC complaint post-hack, Ashley Madison “had no written information security policy, no reasonable access controls, inadequate security training of employees, no knowledge of whether third-party service providers were using reasonable security measures, and no measures to monitor the effectiveness of their system security.” Part of the FTC settlement required that the company add “a comprehensive data-security program, including third-party assessments.”

Speaking with Engadget, Buell made a point to list the security measures that Ashley Madison has since added or will add this year: two factor authentication, a bug bounty program, adherence to the NIST cybersecurity standards. He highlights that it’s hired a new chief information and security officer, and the office displays “artwork that’s mirrored around the idea of a security camera lens.”

“We do not use the data for any type of third party advertising, we don’t run ads on our sites, the data is not moved anywhere from where we own it,” Buell said. “We hold that very, very close to us.”

“Security and discretion” were described among Buell’s key focuses for the 2018. “Ashley’s core differentiator is discretion.”

This galaxy without dark matter is bending the rules of space

The complexities of space are pretty mind-boggling, but there are a handful of accepted theories on which scientists base their research. Space is a vacuum, for example, while a light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles. So researchers at Yale University were understandably shocked when they discovered that one long-held theory might not be right. For years, science has assumed galaxies and dark matter go hand in hand. Now, a galaxy has been discovered that’s almost completely devoid of it.

According to lead author Pieter van Dokkum, dark matter has always been regarded as the most dominant aspect of any galaxy. “For decades, we thought that galaxies start their lives as blobs of dark matter,” he explained. “After that everything else happens: gas falls into the dark matter halos, the gas turns into stars, they slowly build up, then you end up with galaxies like the Milky Way.” So finding this dark matter-less galaxy, catchily-named NGC1052-DF2, “challenges the standard ideas of how we think galaxies form.”

The team made the discovery using a range of equipment, including custom-built telescopes and object spectrographs. Detailed images of NGC1052-DF2 revealed no signs of it interacting with other galaxies, but did show a collection of relatively bright point-like sources, which turned out to be globular clusters. These clusters are large compact groups of stars that orbit the galactic core. Spectral data showed that these clusters were moving significantly slower than you’d expect in a galaxy, and as a rule of thumb, the slower the objects move, the less mass there is in that system. The team’s calculations then showed that all of the mass in the galaxy could be attributed to the mass of these stars, which means there is almost no dark matter in NGC1052-DF2.

The team isn’t sure how this oddball galaxy came to be. “There is no theory that predicted these types of galaxies,” said van Dokkum. “The galaxy is a complete mystery, as everything about it is strange. How you actually go about forming one of these things is completely unknown.” However, there are some speculative theories. One suggestion is that some kind of cataclysmic event swept out all the gas and dark matter, halting star formation. Another is that the creation of NGC1052-DF2 was somehow affected by the formation of another nearby dominant galaxy.

The team is now on the hunt for other dark matter-deficient galaxies, with three potential leads set to be explored in the coming months. But NGC1052-DF2 has nonetheless stumped scientists. “Every galaxy we knew about before has dark matter, and they all fall in familiar categories like spiral or elliptical galaxies,” van Dokkum said. “But what would you get if there were no dark matter at all? Maybe this is what you would get.”

Via: phys.org

Source: Nature

‘No Man’s Sky’ comes to Xbox this summer alongside huge update

No Man’s Sky is coming to Xbox One this summer and it’s bringing a massive update, called “Next”, with it. It’s so massive, in fact, that it’s even got its own logo. There’s no word on what it’ll include, but previous updates Foundation, Pathfinder and Atlas Rises all drastically built upon the scope of the game, so you can expect significant additions. Speaking to Kotaku, game founder Sean Murray said Next will be “by far our biggest update so far.”

Its arrival to Xbox One includes the initial release and all three major updates since, plus enhancements for Xbox One X and support for HDR and 4K. Fans of the game during its exclusive PC and PS4 days have been vocal about their disappointment with previous updates (which to the credit of developer Hello Games have always been free — and substantial). Perhaps Next and the roll-out to Xbox will win back some hearts and minds.

Source: Xbox

Apple Adds New ‘Music Videos’ Section to Apple Music Ahead of iOS 11.3 Release

Apple this morning added a new Music Videos section to its Apple Music streaming service for $9.99 monthly subscribers.

The new section is accessed by way of the Browse panel in iTunes on macOS and iOS 11, and is currently showcasing several music videos that have been available on the service for some time, along with Apple Music exclusives from the likes of Kylie Minogue and Beck. A curated “Today’s Video Hits” playlist and artist spotlight on Taylor Swift are also featured.

Word of new music video content for Apple Music subscribers came via Apple when it outlined many of the upcoming changes in iOS 11.3 in a preview announcement at the beginning of the year.

The company said Apple Music would “soon be the home for music videos,” allowing subscribers to stream all the music videos they want without ads, as well as view and create music video playlists. Users can also expect regularly updated editorial and music video recommendations from Apple, based on the user’s music tastes.

We’re still waiting for the official release of iOS 11.3 to drop. Several beta versions of iOS 11.3 have been made available to developers and public testers since Apple’s preview announcement, but the new Apple Music video category has been introduced separately and is already appearing for a lot of iPhone and iPad users running iOS 11.2.6 and for Mac users with iTunes 12.7 or later installed.

Tags: Apple Music, iOS 11.3
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The new Subaru Forester can tell if you’re sleepy or distracted

Subaru isn’t exactly known for developing emerging technologies for its vehicles, so we’ll bet you’d never expect the automaker to equip the 2019 Forester with facial recognition technology. But that’s exactly what it did — Subaru has announced at the ongoing New York International Auto Show that it developed a feature for the vehicle that uses facial recognition to detect driver fatigue and distraction. “DriverFocus” comes as a standard feature for the most expensive Touring version of the vehicle, though it’s unclear if you can pay extra to have it installed on another model.

The feature runs on top of Subaru’s new driver assist system called EyeSight, which (unlike DriverFocus) will come pre-installed on all Forester models. It’s not a hands-free driving technology, but it covers basic driver assist offerings, such as adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning and lane assist, as well as pre-collision braking. By being able to detect whether a driver is sleepy or tired, the system can be on the alert and activate EyeSight’s functions when needed.

DriverFocus can store info on five drivers and remember their preferences when it comes to seat position, climate and multifunction display. So, it can work even for those looking to buy a 2019 Forester as a family vehicle when it comes out later this year.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from the 2018 New York Auto Show.

Via: Autoblog

Source: Subaru

Brace yourselves for more Alexa lamps

Alexa-enabled devices are pretty ubiquitous these days, especially speakers with the Amazon tech built in. The same can’t be said of smart lamps, however, with the C by GE Sol a rare exception. Amazon just released a design reference that gives third-party manufacturers a leg up in creating their own white-box products that use Alexa. Amazon has chosen two speakers (from Junlam and Narui) and one smart lamp from Adition, each of which have been approved by Amazon.

The idea here is that third-party companies use these designs to quickly iterate Alexa-powered devices of their own. That means we’re bound to see even more smart speakers and — more importantly — smart lamps. Adition’s lamp speaker is a warm, soft, dimming light that has 2-mics, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity along with support for multiple music services. Amazon calls it “an example of how Alexa can be integrated into products already found in the home.”

Via: The Verge

Source: Amazon