Ecuador cracks down on Julian Assange’s internet access

The Ecuadorian government just suspended Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s internet communications, preventing him from sending tweets or other messages from the South American country’s embassy in London. Assange, granted Ecuadorian citizenship this year, has been living at the embassy for six years to avoid extradition for rape charges in Sweden (which have since been dropped).

COMUNICADO OFICIAL | El Gobierno de Ecuador suspende las comunicaciones de @JulianAssange. pic.twitter.com/sr4kArFSxw

— Comunicación Ecuador (@ComunicacionEc) March 28, 2018

This isn’t the first time Assange has been cut off from the internet, though the last time his Twitter account went silent may have been a fluke. Before that, the Ecuadorian government also temporarily shut down Assange’s access to the internet after WikiLeaks published information from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

As translated by a Twitter user as a reply to the original tweet, the Ecuadorian government says that it suspended “the systems that allow Julian Assange to communicate with the outside world” from within the embassy itself. Apparently, Assange breached a written agreement to not send messages that interfered with other governments. While not naming Assange’s last tweet, which fired back at a UK minister who called Assange a “miserable little worm,” the document asserts that Assange’s tweet “puts at risk the good relations that the country maintains with the United Kingdom.”

Via: BuzzFeed

Source: Ecuadorian Embassy/Twitter

Uber trucking exec Lior Ron is leaving the company

The fallout from Uber’s fatal self-driving car collision may extend to its leadership. A CNBC source has claimed that Lior Ron, the co-creator of Otto and thus the co-founder of Uber’s trucking unit, has left the company. While it’s not certain why he would have left, the exit would come just days after the Arizona crash that took the life of a cyclist. We’ve asked Uber for comment, but it declined to comment to CNBC beyond saying it remained “fully invested in and excited about” the Uber Freight business Ron has overseen since joining the transportation tech giant.

A source familiar with the matter confirmed Ron’s exit, and added that he wasn’t involved in Uber’s self-driving unit.

Ron had founded Otto’s autonomous trucking business alongside Anthony Levandowski, who has been at the heart of a Waymo lawsuit accusing Levandowski and Uber of stealing trade secrets to build its driverless car system.

Whatever the reasons, Uber is facing particularly close scrutiny that would put heat on Ron and other leaders. There are fresh concerns that a decision to reduce the number of sensors on Uber’s test vehicles created blind spots. Also, it doesn’t have nearly as much real-world testing experience as rivals like Waymo. Those factors might not have contributed to the crash, but they certainly haven’t helped Uber’s case in light of the Arizona tragedy.

Source: CNBC

Reddit dumps bitcoin as payment option

Since 2013, you’ve had the option of paying for Reddit Gold membership with bitcoin in addition to the usual credit card and PayPal choices. However, you now have to do it the old fashioned way: a moderator has confirmed that Reddit has stopped accepting bitcoin. The social site wants to “watch the progression” of Coinbase Commerce (which lets merchants take various cryptocurrencies as payment) and deal with purchasing glitches before deciding whether or not it restores the feature.

It’s not a backlash against bitcoin, then, but it’s still something of a blow for the digital money format to lose one of its earlier big-name adopters. It also suggests that other stores might join Reddit in holding off on Coinbase’s new platform until they’re comfortable knowing that they can depend on it. The currency still only has a handful of major adopters, and some of them have been backing off due to its volatlity. It may need more stability (both technically and price-wise) if it’s going to continue to grow.

Via: Coindesk, Bloomberg

Source: Reddit

Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘It’s Not True That the iPhone is Not Made in the United States’

“It’s not true that the iPhone is not made in the United States,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said this morning in an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in a response to criticism about its ties to China and other countries.

“We have always made the parts here,” Cook said. “People just look at where the final product is assembled.” In a global world, he explained, manufacturing and assembly needs to be done in a variety of places.

Image via Recode
As Cook has said multiple times in the past, key iPhone components are manufactured in the United States. Display glass for the iPhone and iPad, made by U.S. manufacturer Corning, comes from Kentucky. The Face ID module for the iPhone X comes from Texas. Various chips for Apple devices are also built in the United States, according to Cook, as is equipment for manufacturing the iPhone.

Components manufactured in the U.S. are shipped abroad, with devices assembled by suppliers like Foxconn and Pegatron in China.

Cook said “political pressure” doesn’t push Apple to add U.S. jobs, as it’s something the company is already doing. As Cook often says, Apple could “only have been created in the United States,” and Apple wants to give back. “Businesses should be more than just building revenues and profits,” Cook said. “They should be building people.”

“We know that Apple could only have been created in the United States. We know that. This company would not have flourished in any other country in the world. We love this country. We are patriots. This is our country and we want to create as many jobs as we can in the U.S. We don’t need any political pressure for that.”

Apple in January outlined a five-year plan to contribute $350 billion to the U.S. economy through job creation, existing investments and manufacturing, and new investments. Apple has established an Advanced Manufacturing Fund, for example, to invest in U.S. manufacturing. Apple has thus far invested $200 million in Corning and $390 million in Finisar.

On the topic of job creation and automation, Cook said that it’s important to “get comfortable” with “the notion that education is lifelong.” Jobs, he says, will be “cannibalized over time and replaced by others.” Continuously learning is important, which is why Apple puts such a focus on teaching students of all ages to code. “The jobs of tomorrow are heavily software based,” he said.

“There’s an element of what each of us do, which will be automated over time. That’s not bad. But we need to think about training for the jobs for tomorrow, which will be software-based.”

He said he does not believe the narrative around “doom and gloom” is correct, but he does believe government and businesses need to work together on job retraining and creation for industries that are being automated. “We should not all sit around waiting for government to tell us what to do,” he said.

Tim Cook’s full interview will air on MSNBC on Friday, April 6 at 5:00 p.m. in a segment titled “Revolution: Apple Changing the World.”

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tag: Tim Cook
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Apple Watch Series 3 With LTE to Expand to Thailand on April 5

The Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE is still available in a limited number of countries, even months after its launch, as Apple works to establish connectivity deals with various carriers.

Starting on April 5, customers in Thailand will be able to purchase an LTE Apple Watch Series 3 model through TrueMoveH, according to Apple’s cellular Apple Watch availability page.

Apple users in Thailand have previously been able to purchase WiFi + GPS Apple Watch Series 3 models, but the LTE version has been unavailable in the country.

With the addition of Thailand, Apple Watch Series 3 models with LTE connectivity will be available in more than a dozen countries and territories, including the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Apple Watch Series 3 LTE models were initially available in China at launch but have been discontinued indefinitely as Apple attempts to work out regulatory issues. Apple expects LTE Series 3 models to return to the country at some point in 2018.

While the Apple Watch with LTE is limited in availability, the Apple Watch Series 3 with WiFi and GPS is available in many more countries around the world.

Related Roundups: Apple Watch, watchOS 4Buyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Neutral)
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Tacklife’s $10 USB-rechargeable arc lighter never runs out of gas

Never go digging for matches again!

We haven’t shared a deal on Tacklife’s USB-rechargeable arc lighter in more than a month. This deal is better than any of the previous prices, if only by 30 cents or so. Use coupon code C2E85A9F to bring Tacklife’s USB-rechargeable electric arc lighter down to $9.73.

This might be the last lighter you ever buy! It takes no gas, causes no sparks, and can easily be recharged via USB. It has a built-in 220mAh Li-ion battery and can be used more than 400 times per charge. You won’t have to worry about wind or small splashes when trying to use this either. It will automatically shut down after 10 seconds to both save the battery and as a safety feature. There’s also an extra safety switch for when you’re not using it. It comes with a two-year warranty.

Users give it 4.2 stars based on 65 reviews.

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Oculus Go vs Samsung Gear VR

Take your VR experience with your everywhere, but do you really need your phone to do it?

Oculus and Samsung have been working together for years on a portable, powerful VR solution using some of the most popular phones on the planet. In doing so, the Gear VR has become one of the most vibrant and active VR headsets available today. For all of its strengths, it still requires you use your phone and drain your battery to get the best experience. With everything it has learned about mobile computing and VR experiences, Oculus is prepared to offer an alternative to the phone-powered portable VR headset. It’s called Oculus Go, and it’s coming later this year at a price aimed to make people question using the Gear VR or using this new headset.

This isn’t an easy decision to make, especially if you are already a part of the Gear VR ecosystem, but here’s what you can expect when looking at these headsets side-by-side.

Hardware Compared

Oculus Go is made to be a “standalone” VR headset. That means, instead of sticking a phone into a slot to act as the brain, the computer and display and motion hardware is baked right into the headset. The only thing that computer ever has to do is show you VR experiences, but it has to do so very well. With that in mind, here’s how these headsets compare on paper.

A couple of things stick out right away. First, it’s very unlikely a Gear VR will ever be able to offer the kind of long-term VR experience you can get from an Oculus Go with its dedicated battery. Even if you were interested in totally draining a Galaxy S9+, it’s not going to last as long as this headset will. The built-in speakers in the Oculus Go are going to sound much nicer than your phone speakers as well, both because the Oculus Go speakers are designed for spatial audio and because the Samsung phone in the Gear VR is farther from your ears. That having been said, if you plan to use headphones most of the time the audio experiences will likely be very similar.

Check out our hands on with Oculus Go for more!

But the big difference here is going to be the display. Oculus has managed to increase the Eye Buffer on the Go display so more pixels can be used to deliver visuals to your eyes. On a Gear VR, the display isn’t really built for this experience and so only 1024×1024 pixels can be used to create the visuals that you see. An Oculus Go will be able to use 1280×1280, which makes a considerable difference inside the headset. Coupled with Fixed Foveated Rendering, a new technique Oculus is using to make the parts of the fringes of your vision cost the GPU less to draw, and this headset that seems less powerful on paper will actually meet or outperform the Gear VR in a lot of visual areas.

“The next-generation lenses are our best ever—offering a wide field of view with significantly reduced glare.”

The other particularly important detail when comparing these two headsets is the Field of View (FoV) of the lenses. Samsung has been slowly increasing the FoV on the Gear VR until it has reached the current 101-degree measurement, which is close to what you get with a lot of desktop-quality VR experiences. Meanwhile, the Oculus Go developer blog isn’t giving us too much information on the FoV.

It’s not surprising these headsets look and feel so similar on the outside given how closely Samsung and Oculus have worked together, but it’s clear these experiences will not be at all the same when you go to actually use the headsets.

Similar Software

Oculus maintains all of the software for the Gear VR. When you install the Gear VR software on your phone, it’s the Oculus Store and Oculus Runtime you are installing. You can’t even use your Samsung payment tools to buy VR apps, it all goes through the Oculus services. Samsung makes a couple of great apps for the Gear VR, but this experience is largely made and maintained by Oculus. With Oculus Go, the company is moving from controlling all of the software on an OS made by another company to control the entire experience from top to bottom. There shouldn’t be a ton of differences between the Oculus Go and the Gear VR when it comes to software, but it turns out there will be some important initial limitations.

At launch, Samsung’s Gear VR will continue to have significantly more apps than Oculus Go. Oculus says it should be trivially easy for Gear VR developers to port apps to the Oculus Go, but that doesn’t mean every developer is going to want to. From the retail packaging, we’ve already seen a number of popular VR experiences will be available on Oculus Go at launch, but very little so far indicates the total number of apps will be anywhere near what the Gear VR currently has available. The biggest difference for developers moving to Go from the Gear VR is being able to optimize with the new features being made available. Oculus says some Gear VR games will be able to accomplish 72FPS on Go with some optimization, where on the Gear VR all experiences are limited to 72FPS. This may seem like a small bump, but it brings these “mobile” headsets that much closer to the 90FPS standard seen on “desktop” VR headsets and that’s a big deal.

Considering how similar these headsets are, it wouldn’t be surprising to see this change quickly. We know developers are eager to port games to Go, and many we’ve spoken to have found the process very easy. With the same basic head tracking and motion control systems in both headsets, as long as Oculus can demonstrate people are actually buying this headset there’s little reason for developers to only support the one platform.

Which should you buy?

As similar as these headsets are, there’s some clear strengths and weaknesses here. Oculus Go is made to be portable without killing your phone battery, and from our experiences so far does this very well. You can take a Gear VR with you anywhere you can take an Oculus Go, but unless you also carry around a portable battery it’s not usually great to use the Gear VR when not at home. Oculus Go, on the other hand, will be just as great at home as it would be in a plane or on a train, and as long as the same quality apps and games from the Gear VR store make it to the Oculus Go quickly you’ll be able to really have some fun here.

Naturally, the cost is an issue. Many Gear VR owners got their headset for free when they upgraded to their Samsung phone, and even those who bought the headset typically didn’t spend more than $100 for the current kits. Oculus Go is going to be priced at $199 at launch, and while that is super cheap compared to every other VR headset out there it’s still $199 more than most folks paid for a Gear VR. Whether that upgrade ends up being worth it will be entirely up to Oculus.

Keep your browsing private and secure for as low as $23!

There are so many reasons why you’d want to securely browse the internet anonymously in 2018; whether you don’t like how advertisers and marketers track your every search and click online, you hate dealing with geo-locked content, or you’re bothered by the idea of your ISP or government snooping on you.

The obvious solution is to get yourself a VPN subscription, but those can be a hassle to set up and can end up costing you hundreds of dollars over time. Plus, there’s typically limitations on the number of devices you can use it for.

That’s what makes this deal from Android Central Digital Offers so amazing. You can get a three-year subscription to Windscribe VPN for just $22.40! Featuring a desktop application and a browser extension that work in conjunction with one another, Windscribe VPN not only protects your online privacy and unblocks geo-locked websites but it also removes ads and trackers from your browsing experience.

Windscribe helps you stay private online by blocking ads and trackers and changing your IP address to one that is shared by thousands of people, so your Internet activity cannot be tracked by your Internet Service Provider and other parties. It also features a top-notch firewall and can be used on all your devices simultaneously (compatible with PCs running Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, Macs running OS X 10.8 or later, and Linux as well).

If you’re looking for a more long-term VPN solution, Winscribe also has a 5-year subscription available for $59.99, or you can get a lifetime subscription to Windscribe VPN for just one payment of $69.

A lifetime subscription to Windscribe would typically run you upwards of $900. That’s why you should act now and save 94% with this amazing deal. Keep your browsing private and safe with Windscribe VPN.

See at Android Central Offers

The best way to improve your Google Home experience is to stop talking to it like a computer

Talking to computers just doesn’t feel natural.

In case you haven’t heard, voice control interfaces are the future. Whether it’s Google Assistant on your phone, an Amazon Echo in your kitchen, a microphone-filled remote for your TV or whatever, more and more of technology nowadays expects you to talk to it. And in the cases of some of these tools, talking is the only way to interact with the system. The problem is, it doesn’t always feel natural to talk to a computer, especially after we’ve experienced failed attempts to get these internet-connected “assistants” to listen to us through their array of finely-tuned microphones.

So even though Google Assistant is getting better and better at recognizing “natural” speech, as its end goal is to understand and converse just like a human would, we end up talking to it like it’s a computer — because it is! We speak loudly at a consistent and slow pace. We take unnecessarily large pauses between phrases. We talk to these assistants like they’re babies who don’t yet have a deep grasp of our language.

But I’m here to give you a tip for talking to the Google Assistant on your phone or to Google Home: just speak to it like you would a person.

Put aside all of your preconceived notions about how bad Google Assistant is at recognizing your voice. Forget those times when it misheard you or didn’t hear you at all. Those things happen, and no failed attempt influences whether the microphone will hear you the next time. Talk to the Google Assistant the way it’s expecting to be spoken to: like a human querying another human.

When you say “OK Google” you don’t have to pause before giving your command. If your phone or Home heard “OK Google,” then it’s ready to listen to everything else — even if you don’t see the lights on the Home or your phone’s screen light up right away. Yes sometimes the Home or phone doesn’t hear your wakeup phrase — but that doesn’t change whether you wait to find out or just give it your command and find out later. The voice recognition is improving all the time — both for the wakeup phrase and for subsequent commands. There’s no reason to waste your time pausing for every wakeup just for the off chance that it won’t hear you.

Also, talk at a normal volume. Google is designing the Assistant to listen for and respond to natural language commands, not a special-coded message string said slowly at a near-shouting voice. Likewise, the microphone hardware in devices like the Home and modern phones are designed to hear you at a normal volume level in real-world ambient noise situations. These are finely-tuned devices with software to match, and these companies are on the right track when it comes to designing these products to work with the way we talk, not the other way around.

This is going to feel weird at first. And some of us will never get used to talking to a speaker or our phone as if it’s a person. But in the long run, it’s the best bet to have these systems work the way we expect. This generation of Google Home or Amazon Echo may not catch your wake phrase every time — or may trigger accidentally sometimes — and won’t understand every command you give, but it’s far better than we’re giving it credit for. And shouting at these devices or speaking to them like they’re children doesn’t help the products improve — but adds to our frustration in the meantime.

If we change our side of the interaction, we’re all one step closer to making these virtual assistants the science fiction future we fantasize about.

Google Home

• Google Home review
• Google Home Mini: Everything you need to know!
• Google Home Max review
• These services work with Google Home
• Google Home vs. Amazon Echo
• Join our Google Home forums!

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Keep the party going with these AmazonBasics weatherproof string lights

We spend lots of time making the interior of our home look great, but what about the outside? These $31 AmazonBasics String Lights are here to save the day. These normally sell for about $10 more, and today’s price is as low as it’s ever been. They also have great customer reviews.

This 48-foot string of lights has 15 clear incandescent bulbs. They’re easy to connect with multiple strings, and they’re capable of handling year-round weather. One replacement bulb is included, and the lights are spaced three feet apart. Your purchase is backed by a one-year warranty.

Some good friends of mine got these lights last year, and I love the way they look. They’re strung along a fence in the backyard, where there isn’t much light to be had at night. They cast a soft glow, so you can see where you’re walking without rolling an ankle, and they generally make the space feel more inviting. It’s easier to sit around a patio table and drink copious amounts of beer when you can see what you’re doing. The lights aren’t bright enough to disturb the neighbors, but they do set the mood and make it easy to enjoy a warm summer night outside.

If you prefer the look of globe bulbs, those are also on sale for just a few bucks more.

See at Amazon