This twisted metal bridge in Amsterdam was 3D printed by welding robots

For the past three years, the Dutch 3D-printing company MX3D has been working to build what is possibly the world’s coolest steel footbridge. Designed to stretch across Amsterdam’s Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal, the quasi-organic-looking footbridge looks like something H.R. Giger would’ve created had he pursued a career in civil engineering.

Aside from its look, what makes the bridge exciting is its method of construction — which involved four special welding robots capable of laying down layers of molten metal.

“We use industrial robots that are commonly used in the car industry and fit them with high-end MIG-welding equipment,” Tim Geurtjens, co-founder of MX3D, told Digital Trends. “What turns that combination into a 3D printer is the software and strategies we have developed for driving the robot, and for getting a grip on the very complex welding process. Simply explained, we melt a thin wire of just about any metal you would like and deposit that upon the last layer. This way the part keeps on growing. The material that it results in is strong, durable and homogenous, just about as good as the material you put in.”

Despite this superior technology, however, Geurtjens says the process wasn’t always straightforward. “This whole project has been a great challenge,” he acknowledged. “All we knew was that we wanted to print a metal bridge with the technique we, at that time, had just started developing.”

Originally, the idea was to print the bridge “live” over the canal. But this ambitious idea — which would have made for spectacular viewing for passers-by — fell by the wayside, due to permits, budget, and time constraints. As a result, the team printed the bridge in their workshop. They also had to scale down some of the wackier aspects of the design, although the finished product still looks spectacular.

“In the design process, sometimes our imagination proved to be a bit too wild for the sometimes conservative construction world,” he said. “The level of complexity that could be achieved by our printers could not be handled by the structural engineering software for instance. However, I think that the final design shows very well what the possibilities of additive manufacturing in general and our printers in particular are. These organic, optimized forms would not have been possible to print with any other technique.”

Now that the bridge is finished, the team will next put it through its paces for load-bearing, using a variety of smart sensors and 3D scanners to test for its durability. By October 2018, final tests will be carried out and the bridge can then be installed.

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Google employees ask CEO to cancel the Pentagon Maven A.I. project

More than 3,000 Google employees wrote an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai wanting out of what they term “the business of war.” Google senior engineers were among thousands of Google staff members who signed the letter, according to The New York Times.

The employees’ letter asks for the immediate cancellation of a specific military project and a more general policy statement about building technology for the military.

First, the letter requested that Google to immediately cancel its role in implementing Project Maven. The code name for a Department of Defense (DoD) Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT), Project Maven is an artificial intelligence (A.I.) program currently under development. Maven’s purpose is to assess drone video footage, Gizmodo reported.

Project Maven was established by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for the Pentagon in April 2017. A letter under Deputy Secretary of Defense letterhead date stamped April 26, 2017 states the DoD needs to “integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning more effectively across operations to maintain advantages over increasingly capable adversaries and competitors.”

The Defense Deputy Secretary’s announcement says the initial intended use of Maven is to to provide “computer vision algorithms for object detection, classification, and alerts” for tactical Unmanned Aerial System (UAS), or drones.

The second, more general request in the Google letter, is that Pichai “draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”

Participating in Project Maven will “irreparably damage Google’s brand and its ability to compete for talent,” the letter states. Google is “struggling to keep the public’s trust,” the letter continues, while many fear “biased and weaponized A.I.”

The letter refers to a Google core value statement: “Every one of our users is trusting us. Never jeopardize that. Ever.” The letter’s signatories assert that the contract with the DoD directly opposes this core value and places the company’s reputation at risk.

Former Google CEO and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was the keynote speaker at the November 2017 Center for a New American Security Artificial Intelligence and Global Security Summit. Schmidt was asked about the relationship between tech companies, A.I. research, and national security.

“There’s a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly,” Schmidt said.

The letter to current CEO Pichai is evidence that at least for those who signed it, the general concern Schmidt mentioned is real and specific.

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Microsoft’s OneDrive now has your back in a ransomware attack

Imagine logging into your computer in preparation for an important day of work, and you’re greeted with a notice that none of your files are accessible. They’re there, only locked away in strong encryption unless you pay some faraway stranger real money for the key needed decrypt them. That’s ransomware, and Microsoft is building anti-ransomware functionality into its OneDrive cloud storage solution that can help mitigate the damage.

The news comes via Microsoft’s Office blog, and it refers to a pair of features that were first introduced for OneDrive for Business and that the company is now pushing to anyone who’s signed up for an Office 365 Home or Personal subscription. The features work together to help users recover their files in the event of a ransomware attack.

First, there is ransomware detection and recovery. This feature monitors OneDrive looking for signs of a ransomware attack and then inform the user via email, mobile, or desktop notifications. Then, users are guided through a recovery process using the second feature, Files Restore.

Files Restore is a feature that allows users to restore an entire OneDrive repository to a time prior to a ransomware attack, up to 30 days before. The feature can be used to recover from a number of catastrophic events in addition to ransomware, including accidental mass deletions, file corruption, or other incidents. That means that no matter the cause, users can recover all of their OneDrive files and return to a workable state relatively quickly and easily.

Office 365 Home and Personal subscriptions both come with 1TB of storage for up to five user accounts with the Home version and a single user with the Personal version. That is likely plenty of storage for many people, at least when it comes to the most important documents, photos, and videos.

Storing these files on OneDrive can therefore be a viable disaster recovery tool. While it may not replace the need to perform regular backups, it’s easier than creating a process to keep those backups completely disconnected from a PC. After all, any files that are accessible from a PC can theoretically be included in a ransomware attack, and so merely creating a backup file to an attached drive or network attached storage (NAS) device isn’t sufficient protection.

Microsoft is also rolling out additional protections, including email encryption in Outlook.com, the ability to password-protect OneDrive sharing links, and forwarding restrictions on Outlook.com email messages. Also, links in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents will receive real-time checks for sites containing malware, with a redirection to a warning page prior to downloading.

Users can look for the Files Restore, Outlook.com encryption, and ransomware protection features over the next several weeks. The other features will roll out sometime in the near future.

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Fribo is a cat-like robot that tells your friends what’s going on in your home

Whether it’s Apple’s HomePod, Google’s Google Home or Amazon’s Echo, you can’t throw a rock in 2018 without hitting a tech giant that is jumping on the smart artificial intelligence assistant bandwagon. A new project created by roboticists in South Korea adds a slightly different twist to the smart speaker concept, however, through a constantly listening robot that is designed to help us stave off loneliness.

Called Fribo, the cat-looking robot device works by listening to the sounds in your home, and then figuring out what you are doing using A.I. Once it knows this, it will then pass this information on to friends in your social circle in the hopes that it triggers an interaction.

For example, if it hears you opening your fridge door, your buddy could receive a message alerting them to this fact, and pondering “which food your friend is going to have?” That may sound a bit creepy, but the hope is that these kinds of prompts could cause people to communicate more. (Even if we might personally feel a bit alarmed if a friend we hadn’t heard from for a while called up to ask why we’ve opened the fridge at 10 p.m. on a Friday night!)

“The primary function of Fribo is to share the daily activities to alleviate isolated feeling and loneliness that one experiences while living at home alone,” the researchers noted in a paper about the project.

Fribo isn’t the only example we’ve come across of smart assistants which aim to promote social interactions. Intuition Robotics’ ElliQ, for instance, is designed with the elderly in mind. Like a mix of the Amazon Echo and a robotic version of the animated Pixar mascot, ElliQ uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to both offer limited robo-companionship, and also to suggest that owners reach out to friends and family regularly.

At this stage, it’s not clear whether Fribo will make it to market. The researchers suggest a long-term study, which would test the technology on users around the world. While we’re not sure that this is a solution everyone would be happy with, we do think that the researchers are asking the right questions about the isolating effects of technology and modern life.

Master your big-screened Apple iPad with these handy tips and tricks

Behind the iPad’s slim exterior, Apple has hidden away a trove of tools and capabilities you can use to make your iPad experience faster or more personalized. Many people may never use the full capabilities of their iOS tablet, because they’re unaware these features exist. We’re going to change that with our handy list of iPad tips and tricks.

Many of these tips work for new and old iPads — including the latest 9.7-inch iPad (2018) — though you’ll need to be on iOS 11. You can read our guide on how to download and install the latest version of iOS for more. If you have an iPad Pro, check out our tips and tricks to master Apple’s most powerful tablets.

How to pass along your settings

Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

If you are moving to a new iPad from an older model, you may be dreading changing all the settings to what you like best. Fortunately, there’s a really easy way to do this. Just make sure that your old iPad (or your iPhone, if you like those settings) is turned on and near your new iPad when you first start setting it up.

The new iPad should sense the presence of the Apple device, and ask you if you want to transfer over important settings information — you may have to input your Apple ID first, though.

How to split screens

Julian Chokkatuu/Digital Trends

Your iPad supports split screen capabilities for quickly comparing information or multitasking. If you want to split web page views, head to Safari. When you find a link that you want to move to a split screen, touch and hold the link until options come up to open it. One of those options should be Open in Split View. This will create a new side-by-side window for the link.

You can also open some other apps in a split screen mode for multitasking. An excellent example is the Messages app: No matter what you are doing, you can swipe up on the bottom of the iPad screen and access the Dock, where you can add the Messages app (or access recently opened apps). You can drag Messages up to the side of your screen, and it will pop up in a separate side window where you can view and respond to any new messages you have without losing track of what else you are doing.

This trick may not work with all apps, but many do have this handy functionality. Many apps also allow you to drag and drop images or files between them for quick pasting or saving while you are at work. You can also swipe up from the bottom of the screen to access the Control Center, and see the most recently opened apps.

How to lock your screen orientation

This is one of the most searched-for functions among new iPad users who want their screen to stay in one place instead of bouncing between vertical and horizontal modes depending on what the gyroscope says. Fortunately, it’s easier to lock your orientation than ever before.

Double tap the Home button at any time to open your Control Center. Unless your Control Center has already been heavily customized, you should see the orientation lock in the upper right-hand corner — it’s a circling arrow around a lock icon. Tap that icon, and it will change color, letting you know that the current orientation has been locked. As mentioned earlier, you can also swipe up from the bottom of the screen to access the Control Center.

How to customize the Control Center

In iOS 11, Apple updated the Control Center with a different design and a new way to manage basic controls like volume and brightness (you can double tap the home button at any time to get a closer look at it).

If you want your Control Center to have different toggles, however, you can customize it for your preferred arrangement. Head over to Settings > Control Center, and choose Customize Controls. This tool allows you to add various control options and change the order in which they appear. You can put in controls for tasks that you may use regularly, such as controlling your Apple TV. Take a look through it and personalize your Center.

How to get more storage space

Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

First, always update your iOS version when possible — improvements to iOS often include better storage formats or data management that can free up space (not to mention it’s better for security as well).

Second, if you have iCloud, then head to Settings > Messages > Messages on iCloud to make sure that iCloud is syncing and storing messages. Then go back to Settings > General > Storage. Here, you need to make sure that Auto Delete Old Conversations is enabled. This will get rid of old messages that may have been synced up to your iPad from your iPhone, while still making sure they are stored in the cloud.

For further storage, you can also enable Offload Unused Apps in the same section. This will keep app data stored, but it gets rid of unused apps. It’s great if you start collecting a bunch of apps but don’t end up using many of them.

How to switch to a better keyboard

Are you finding it hard to type, particularly on the new 9.7-inch model? Try adjusting your onscreen keyboard. When the keyboard is open, press the emoji (smiley face) button and hold it until options appear. Choose Keyboard settings, which will whisk you away to a new window with many keyboard options. You can also head to Settings > General > Keyboard to access these options.

Pay special attention to the Split Keyboard setting, which shifts the keyboard into two different sections that may make it easier to type with both hands. Note that you can also download new types of keyboards that may be more suited to your tastes, like Gboard or SwiftKey.

How to invert colors

If you really don’t care for the iOS colors, you can make everything a lot darker by inverting the color scheme. Simply head over to Settings > General > Accessibility. In Accessibility, look for Display Accommodations. This should include an option to Invert Colors. Try it out and see if it improves the color scheme for you. There are also a few other color-shifting options here if you want to experiment further.

Plex VR app now available for Oculus and Gear VR

A Daydream exclusive no more!

Plex continues to be one of the best media libraries around, and if you’ve got a Google Daydream, chances are you’ve messed around with the Plex VR app. Plex wants to make sure as many people as possible can experience their movies and TV shows in VR, and as such, has expanded this to Oculus and Samsung’s Gear VR.

The Daydream Plex VR app will continue to get regular updates just like usual, but with the expansion to Oculus and Gear VR, far more people will be able to join in on the fun.

You can browse through all of your content in VR, and once you’ve found something you want to watch, you can send yourself to a virtual high-rise apartment or drive-in movie theater. Additionally, all of the menus and UI elements have been reworked to be as accessible as possible while in virtual reality.

There’s no word on PlayStation VR, SteamVR, or HTC Vive support, but this is still much better than being exclusive to one single platform. Well done, Plex.

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Four tricks worth stealing from Apple Music

“Good artists copy; great artists steal,” is as true for music apps as it is for musical artists.

If a feature is popular on one music app, it doesn’t take long for it to start appearing on other apps. This happens more for big, bold features than it does for the sophisticated little touches that make good apps great, which is a shame because these four features on Apple Music’s Android app might go unnoticed by most, but they could have a massive impact if they were brought to more music apps.

Hey, Spotify and Google Play Music, you might wanna take some notes.

Pause means pause

I’ll hit play when I’m good and ready.

When you’ve come to a cluster of duds in a shuffle, it’s natural to pause and start swiping through your queue until you find something you like. For many of us, those swipes are interrupted by a need to pause the music again and again because each time we go to a new song, that song starts automatically. Some users like this, but some of us prefer to wait until we’ve hit Play again for the music to resume. In Apple Music, you can hit next/previous song while paused and the next song won’t start instantly. It’s a small features, but it’s the little things that matter in a music app.

Individual song downloads

Want to download a single song from an album in your library? Well, you have two options: download the whole album, or you can add that song to a playlist and download that whole playlist. The only songs you can download by themselves are singles, one-track albums. This has been a fairly common gripe on streaming music services for years, and I’ve been known to build a playlist with two or three songs just so I could download them without getting the songs I don’t like stuck in my downloaded music shuffle.

Apple Music has a truly miraculous feature: you can download a single song without downloading the whole album. Next to every single song in every single playlist or album is an individual download icon.

What. A. Shocking. Concept!

Playlist management

I’m something of a playlist snob. I admit it. I’ve spent hours and hours agonizing over the mix and order of my Disney All Day megamix, and when I’m getting ready to build a playlist, nothing grind my gears more than Spotify’s reticence to allow easy playlist editing on Android, and their insistence on deleting songs from a playlist One. At. A. Time. Play Music at least allows you to edit things fairly easily on the Play Music website, but you’re still stuck doing things one at a time in the app.

Not so on Apple Music.

It’s easy to mass delete from playlists, meaning you can add whole albums, delete out what you don’t want and go about your business. You can also set custom photos for your playlists right from the app, unlike Spotify, who makes you go to the desktop apps to set custom playlist covers.

Playing search results

If you click on a song in a search result in Apple Music, it plays that song and only that song. It doesn’t play that song and then go on to the rest of the search results like Spotify and Google Play. This is amazing because chances are only one of the results in your search is what you actually wanted to hear, so if you hit play in the search results you’re going to be scrambling to clear your queue the second that song ends and it goes to music you didn’t want to hear.

What else is worth stealing?

If you’ve ever used Apple Music, what else do you think is worth bringing to other music apps? Are there any old features from iTunes you’re still missing these days? I’m still wishing Google Play Music would bring on Smart Playlists so my most-listened-to tracks from that month and all time would be easily accessible, but I’m someone who listens to my favorites over and over and over and over.

What are you missing? What do you want to make the leap to your music service? Tell us in the comments!

Today’s best deals you won’t want to miss

Whether you’re looking for new tech gear or household items, we’ve got you covered.

Today you can get big discounts on smart thermostats, Bluetooth receivers, the Apple TV, and more! Don’t pass these up.

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If you want to know about the deals as soon as they are happening, you’ll want to follow Thrifter on Twitter, and sign up for the newsletter, because missing out on a great deal stinks!

Phantom Auto will drive your autonomous car if it gets confused

Imagine, you’re sitting in your autonomous taxi when suddenly the power goes out and the traffic signals in your area no longer function. To keep things moving, traffic officers arrive at the intersection, waving cars through and the vehicles with human drivers move on without too much trouble. But your robot-controlled car stops.

The car is confused by the lights being out, the human in the road, and the other cars seemingly driving into the intersection for no reason. Companies are doing their best to train their autonomous vehicle systems but there are too many variables to account for every situation. That’s where Phantom Auto comes in. The startup based out of Mountain View, California wants to put a human behind the wheel of autonomous cars. But that “wheel” could actually be hundreds of miles away.

Phantom Auto wants to be the backup system for autonomous vehicles. When self-driving cars get confused, the company’s trained drivers remotely take over the automobile until the self-driving system can regain control. For the human back at the “call center,” it looks a bit like a driving simulator. For the people in the car, it’s redundancy that (especially for some early adopters), could ease their worried minds.

I was able to take a ride in one of those remotely controlled cars in Mountain View. While I sat in the passenger seat of a specially outfitted Lincoln MKZ, Ben Shukman, a trained Phantom One driver took control of the car and we went out onto the streets of Silicon Valley.

At one point the car needs to pull out of a parking lot, across three lanes of traffic on a busy street and into the left turning lane. There are a few moments when I wonder if Shai Magzimof, founder and CEO of Phantom Auto who is sitting in the driver’s seat, will have to take the wheel. But after a few moments Shukman pulls it off and the car is in the correct lane, blinker flashing without the help of anyone actually in the vehicle.

The experience wasn’t exactly like having a person in the car behind the wheel, but it was close. Close enough that if I had been in an actual self-driving car and it encountered something it couldn’t handle, it was comforting to know someone miles away could just start driving the car.

The company notes automakers, ride-hailing companies and other entities are training their autonomous systems both on the road and in simulations, but you can’t account for everything. “You can train your machine to learn with edge cases which do not exist. You can try to replicate as much as you want in simulation but real-world edge cases are almost impossible to replicate,” Magzimof said.

It’s those edge cases that keep autonomous driving teams up at night and make services like Phantom Auto so vital to the future of driving. These cars will get confused. No amount of training can prepare a self-driving system for every situation.

While I was only a few miles from the company’s headquarters during my ride, at CES 2018, the company had a driver in Mountain View controlling a car 550 miles away in Vegas. The only limiting factor is bandwidth and Phantom Auto assured me that because they are using multiple carriers at once, dead zones wouldn’t be a problem.

It also helps that the company goes out and collects data points (like bandwidth and latency) for every latitude and longitude it tracks within a geofenced area. Since autonomous vehicles will more than likely be initially deployed as taxis and will be confined to a specific area or route, Phantom Auto’s mapping system makes sense. While it’s not too concerned about dead zones (since most systems will be in urban areas), the company is looking forward to 5G deployment which should cover more areas and reduce latency.

Magzimof wouldn’t share specific speed numbers but did say that the system is encountering less than a hundred milliseconds of latency. The video clarity from the car’s cameras back at the office did look impressive and there didn’t seem to be any issues during the demo drive. But the company cautions that this is only for taking over confused cars that ping their call centers filled with trained drivers, not for emergency situations.

For example, if one of these cars is flying down the highway at 70 miles-per-hour and suddenly something falls out of a truck that confuses the car, Phantom Auto can’t help you. It’s hoping to be able to take over these vehicles within 30 seconds at the very most. Not exactly capable of keeping you out of harm’s way in a dire emergency.

Instead, Phantom Auto will initially be a bridge between what autonomous services want to be and what they will be out of the gate. Then it’ll be a backup for all the weird things that happen on the road that a computer can’t initially figure out. It’ll be decades before there are level 5 fully autonomous cars on the road that can handle any situation. Between now and then, it’ll make that very long transition easier for people to swallow if they know that if things get weird, somewhere there’s a trained driver behind the wheel of a computer ready to help you get you where you’re going.

Facebook uses AR to make movie posters more interactive

It’s been about a year since Facebook revealed its plans for camera-centric augmented reality. Now the company is moving ever further into an AR future with “target tracking,” a way to connect images, logos, signs and pictures in the real world with augmented content using the Facebook camera. A Wrinkle in Time and Ready Player One are already using the tech via closed beta, and a developer toolkit for everyone else is on its way later this spring.

The company says the idea behind target tracking is to help create “persistent AR – experiences that are connected to and persist relative to places or things in the real world.” Movie posters are fairly ubiquitous around the globe, making them a perfect test case for the technology. The team has also optimized things so a wide range of devices can access the AR content, from Apple’s iPhone 5s and up to Android devices released in 2012 and later.

Via: Road to VR

Source: Facebook