‘Pokémon Go’ will keep users hooked with daily bonuses
Now that Halloween is over, the folks at Niantic Labs have cooked up a new bonus scheme to keep players coming back for more. The next update to Pokémon Go will make it easier to rack up more XP, items and Stardust if you catch a Pokémon or visit a PokéStop every day.
For starters, your first Pokémon catch of the day will kick in 500 XP and 600 Stardust, but if you go on a seven-day catching streak, you’ll be rewarded with a quadruple bonus of 2,000 XP and 2,400 Stardust. Likewise, if you’ve got a favorite PokéStop that you visit on a daily basis, that’ll start to pay off a little bit more. Trainers will get 500 XP and bonus items on their first PokéStop visit and seven straight days of check-ins will bless your character with 2,000 XP and even more item pickups.
If you’re curious, the bonuses refresh every night at midnight in your local time. So, if you catch a Pokémon at 5 PM on a Tuesday, you’ll be eligible for the next daily bonus at 12 AM on Wednesday morning. This latest update, combined with a more balanced playing field should make it easier for casual Pokémon Go players to get a quick boost while also rewarding the hardcore fans still walking around with their phones out.
Source: Pokémon Go Live
The 12 best tech gifts for sports fanatics
Chances are there’s at least one die-hard sports fan in your life. And look, even if your idea of game-time small talk is “Hey, how about that local sportsball team” you can still get them the perfect gift. Whether they’re big NBA addicts, avid runners or trying to perfect that spiral and become an NFL quarterback, we’ve got you covered. And you don’t even have to betray your tech-geek roots to do it. There’s plenty of ways to get your game on while simultaneously getting your geek on. High-end TVs deliver football in 4K glory while wearables like the TomTom Adventurer let you turn that epic hike into epic reams of data. Check out the gallery bellow to see our 12 techie gift recommendations sports fans and athletes.
Google Wallet launches a streamlined web app
Google Wallet may have killed off physical debits cards earlier this year, but the service is now making it easier to send and receive money with the card you already have. With the launch of the Google Wallet web app, all you need to accept online payments from friends is a browser and debit card tied to your Google account.
Of course, users can still use the Google Wallet app for iOS or Android Pay to pay their friends or accept funds on their mobile devices as well, and thanks to automatic transfers there’s no need to cash out before the money shows up in your bank account. Finally, while Google Wallet is mostly aimed at person-to-person payments like Venmo, Squarecash and Paypal, Android Pay is also rolling out new integrations with hundreds of thousands of websites to simplify commercial check-out processes across the web.
Source: Google Wallet
Atlas Recall is a cross-platform search with a big caveat
Imagine if you had a personal assistant that was constantly taking screenshots of everything you looked at on your computer and filing them away for future reference. Imagine then, if you could call upon that assistant to pull up that obscure Wikipedia page you were looking at while you were working on your business proposal at 3pm yesterday. That tool now exists, and is called Atlas Recall.
You’re probably thinking, “I’ve heard of this before. Doesn’t it already exist?” You’re most likely thinking of Universal Search in Mac OS or Spotlight in Mac and iOS. Or, perhaps, Google. But Atlas Recall is more like an amalgamation of these different services. While Google can only search the indexed Web and information from accounts you’ve signed into, it can’t look at documents stored locally on your laptop or iPhone. And although Spotlight and Universal Search trawl your apps, files and even the internet, they can’t pull up a page from your browsing history or make associations with other things you were looking at. Atlas Recall is unique in its ability to sort your results by other events at the same time.
During a demo, Atlas Informatics’ founder Jordan Ritter showed off how the program was able to pull up the resume of a specific candidate by looking up the words “security engineer.” You can also look for something based on time you opened it, or what you were doing when you saw it. Search results were laid out visually, with screenshots of each listing organized by file type (images, documents, web pages etc). This layout supposedly helps jog users’ memories and enables them to more quickly find what they were looking for. It’s this graphical sorting system that led Ritter to describe Atlas Recall as “a searchable photographic memory.” It’s a bit cheesy, but comes close to describing the tool.
Obviously, privacy concerns are huge with something that can watch your every digital move. To assuage these, Ritter said each user has full control over what gets indexed and what doesn’t. There’s a Pause mode that temporarily stops the tool from capturing your sordid browsing behavior for 15, 30 or 60 minutes. And if you never want your sensitive data, such as banking information, captured, you can block certain sources, like your bank’s website, from being scanned altogether. As for the content you do allow, it is all encrypted “at rest and in motion,” said Ritter. So when it’s being beamed to the cloud and when it’s on your device, your data is scrambled for security.
Right now, Atlas Recall is only available as an open beta on Macs and iOS (as a companion app that requires the desktop version). A Windows 10 option will be available soon, but the outlook for an Android version isn’t clear. Only Chrome and Safari are supported right now, although other browsers are being tested. The service’s limited availability makes the whole “search everything!” spiel a lot less convincing, but with more time and testing, Atlas Recall has the potential to become a really powerful and useful tool.
YouTube deal ends years-long fight over music videos in Germany
German music fans haven’t had it easy in the past 7 years. A royalty dispute with music rights group GEMA has forced YouTube to block thousands of music videos in the country, leaving locals no choice but to either find alternative video sources or (gasp) settle for audio alone. At last, though, they can relax: GEMA and YouTube have reached a deal that makes sure GEMA members get paid for video streams. The exact terms of the deal aren’t public, but it’ll cover both the usual ad-supported free viewing as well as the eventual European launch of YouTube Red subscriptions.
The two haven’t completely buried the hatchet. GEMA says there are “different legal positions” on whether or not users are responsible for licensing any music content they upload. However, it’s still a breakthrough. The pact should not only greenlight videos from German artists, but international stars (Bloomberg mentions Katy Perry and Psy). Effectively, Germany is syncing with YouTube’s broader music community — you won’t miss out on a cultural phenomenon just because you live in Munich instead of Miami.
Via: Bloomberg
Source: GEMA, YouTube Official Blog
The Morning After: Wednesday November 2nd, 2016
Yes, it’s the start of hump day, but you may have missed Google revealing unpatched Windows 10 bugs, the truth of the dark web and (in cheerier news) our beautiful Engadget Holiday Gift Guide. We also take a closer look at Xiaomi’s plan to become more than just the king of budget smartphones.
It’s always good to find bugs in the competitionGoogle reveals unpatched Windows bug that hackers are exploiting
Google announced that it had found previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in both Windows and Flash last month, and while Adobe had fixed its issue by October 26th, Microsoft has yet to do so. Worse still, Google says that hackers are “actively exploiting” the flaw. Microsoft responded by saying that enhancements from the Windows 10 Anniversary Update protected computers from this vulnerability. There is, however, a patch coming on November 8th.
Holidays are here (again)Stuck for presents? Already? We may have a few ideas …
A hundred and twenty of them, in fact. It’s our biggest guide ever, separated into ten categories, divided further by price. The aim is to offer suggestions for pretty much every reader. Or relative of an Engadget reader. Hopefully. Take a dive.
eSports continues its marchWatch out, Twitch and YouTube: Facebook wants to get deeper into eSports
Given its continued growth, it’s not surprising that Facebook is showing increased interest in professional gaming. The social network has already partnered with publishers like Activision Blizzard to bring daily content to Facebook Live, but now it’s apparently been holding talks to stream professional gaming matches with companies like Super Evil Megacorp. Facebook is in talks with Activision to acquire streaming rights to more eSport competitions — putting it in direct competition with other streamers like YouTube and Twitch.
It must be doing something rightXiaomi aims for more than king of the budget smartphones
The company’s ludicrous Mi MIX phone didn’t happen overnight. Here’s how the company (with some Philippe Starck magic) managed to make a device with a near-bezel-less display and fancy ceramic body — and why it did it.
Time to get politicalZoltan Istvan wants your vote for US president
Not happy with the current choices for president? Engadget interviewed Transhumanist Party candidate Zoltan Istvan about his platform, which is “putting science, health and technology at the forefront of American politics.”
It doesn’t danceThe first phone with Google’s Project Tango augmented reality tech is here
The $499 Lenovo Phab 2 Pro is packed with sensors and cameras that let it “see” its environment better than any phone before. Playing “Pokémon Go” is one thing, but Project Tango apps go even further, blending virtual objects with real life or using the phone itself as a precise motion controller. Still, we’ll need software that goes beyond furniture shopping or toy car racing to prove Tango is at the must-have level of GPS.
The follow-up to the Galaxy Note 7 of electric vehiclesThe Fisker EMotion shows off drool-worthy specs and design
Sure, the Fisker Karma will go down as a smoky footnote in EV history, but its creator is back to try again with the EMotion. Henrik Fisker tweeted pictures of this slick design and pie-in-the-sky specs (fully autonomous driving, carbon fiber, 400 miles of range, 161 mph top speed, butterfly doors) while claiming it will start shipping in mid-2017. You probably have a better shot at getting a Model 3.
But wait, there’s more…
- For the next two years, customers will be allowed to (try to) repair their own electronics
- Terbium Labs claims the dark web is far less intimidating than it seems
- Roli’s touch-sensitive music-making blocks won’t break your budget
MIT makes neural nets show their work
Turns out, the inner workings of neural networks really aren’t any easier to understand than those of the human brain. But thanks to research coming out of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), that could soon change. They’ve devised a means of making these digital minds not just provide the correct answer, classification or prediction, but also explain the rationale behind its choice. And with this ability, researchers hope to bring a new weapon to bear in the fight against breast cancer.
The scientific community has made tremendous strides in developing neural networks, computer systems that are built to operate like the human brain. Researchers have managed to get these systems to beat the world’s best Go players, identify images and shrink their file sizes. Neural networks now power keyboard apps and photo editors. Heck, we’ve even taught them to write like Philip K Dick. Most incredibly, Google recently taught two nets to design their own encryption algorithm.
The problem, however, is that even the researchers that designed these systems aren’t particularly sure how they actually work. It isn’t so bad with image-recognition nets because researchers can suss out the reasoning based on the images, but it’s far more difficult to do with text-based systems.
So, to illuminate the computer’s decision-making process, the CSAIL team split their network into a pair of smaller modules — one for extracting segments of text and scoring them according to their length and coherence. Short segments pulled from lengths of consecutive words score highest. The second module predicts the subject of the segment and attempts to classify it accordingly.
For their test, the team used online reviews from a beer rating website and had their network attempt to rank beers on a 5-star scale based on the brew’s aroma, palate, and appearance, using the site’s written reviews. After training the system, the CSAIL team found that their neural network rated beers based on aroma and appearance the same way that humans did 95 and 96 percent of the time, respectively. On the more subjective field of “palate,” the network agreed with people 80 percent of the time.
After some more development and tuning, the MIT researchers hope to eventually unleash their machine learning system in the fight against breast cancer as a means of extracting and analyzing the explanations pathologists give for their diagnoses.
Source: MIT CSAIL
Microsoft patch for Google-outed exploit is still a week away
Microsoft is still more than a little upset at Google revealing unpatched Windows security flaws, but it’ll at least have a solution in hand in the days ahead. The software giant now plans to issue a patch for affected version of Windows on November 8th. You’re if you use both Windows 10 Anniversary Update and a sufficiently up to date browser (both Chrome and Edge should be safe), but you’ll definitely have to be cautious if you can’t use one of the known safe browsers or the latest version of Windows.
There’s good reason to be careful, too. In elaborating Google’s warning about active exploits, Microsoft reports that a group nicknamed Strontium has used the vulnerabilities in both Windows and Adobe Flash to run a “low-volume” phishing campaign. You probably won’t be targeted by that group, but that’s not the point. The company is concerned that attacks are not only in the wild, but that other hacking teams may take advantage of the data to launch their own hostile code. A week can be a long time in the security world, after all. While there’s a chance that Google’s rapid-fire public disclosure accelerated the patch, it might well have exposed people to unnecessary danger.
Source: Microsoft
Project Tango game ‘Woorld’ is here to make your life silly
This one is for all the Levovo Phab2 Pro owners out there. The Project Tango-powered augmented reality game Woorld is available today via the Google Play Store, just for Phab2 Pro people. Woorld comes from Keita Takahashi, the creator of eccentric classics Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, and it features a familiar brand of adorable, cartoonish characters and objects. However, since this is an AR game, everything is overlaid on the real world through the Phab2 Pro’s screen.
Players are able to map their surroundings and then place things like houses, sprouts, clouds, mushrooms, pyramids, snowmen and cute little box-like characters anywhere around the environment. The objects interact with each other — the sprout grows into a flower after it receives some rain from a cloud, for example.
We got a closer look at Woorld in May and found it to be a creative, sandbox-style experience. Woorld comes from Takahashi and Funomena, an independent game studio founded by Journey developers Robin Hunicke and Martin Middleton.
The Phab2 Pro hit shelves today for $500. It’s the first-ever phone to launch with Google’s Tango depth-sensing technology, and to show off all the fancy AR features, 35 new Tango apps hit the Google Play Store today.
Source: Funomena
Conjure spells on your phone to prepare for ‘Fantastic Beasts’
J.K. Rowling’s prequel to the Harry Potter series is set to hit theaters next week and Google wants to help you prepare by turning your phone into a magic wand. On an Android device, you can cast “spells” with an “OK Google” voice command. After you alert your phone with the magic phrase, follow it up with a command like “lumos” and “nox” to turn the flashlight on and off. You can also use “silencio” to mute any sounds and notifications. Sure, it’s rather simple, but it’s a neat way for Potter fans to get ready for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them ahead of next week’s debut.
The movie promotions don’t stop there as Google lets you explore the streets of New York in 1926 via Maps. You can visit key locations in the film and take a virtual tour of each, including the Magical Congress of the USA (MCUSA). Google already detailed its Daydream VR experience where you’ll need to help Newt capture his escaped beasts before they cause a bigger ruckus. Of course, Google’s Daydream View headset will arrive this month, so you’ll have to wait to test drive the more immersive promo piece and use the controller as a magic wand.
Lastly, Google’s Allo messaging app is set to get some Fantastic Beasts-themed stickers to enhance your movie-related convos. Stickers are all the rage these days, so this isn’t a huge surprise after the recent Allo-assisted Stranger Things scavenger hunt and sticker pack. If you’re looking to check out all of the stuff Google created for the movie, the company has a dedicated site to all the goods right here.
Source: Google
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