MasterCard is testing a new way for you to pay with your face
MasterCard announced on Thursday that it’s looking to add a layer of biometric security to its credit cards and all user will need to do is simply take a selfie. The system will create a digitized map of your face, convert that map into a hash and compare it to the hash stored on Mastercard’s servers. Users will be able to pay through a mobile app with either their fingerprints or by staring into the device and blinking once. The blink is used to prevent someone from just holding up a picture of you to spoof the system. What’s more, “They’re storing an algorithm, not a picture of you,” Phillip Dunkelberger, who runs Nok Nok Labs, told CNN Money. “And I’m sure they’re doing the appropriate stuff to guard it.”
The company reportedly already has deals in place with Google, Apple, Blackberry and Microsoft, with hopes to begin a limited 500-person pilot program later this fall. Once they work out all the kinks with the new system, it could be available to the public as early as next year.
Filed under: Handhelds, Apple, Google
Via: SlashGear
Source: CNN Money
Nexus 4, 10 and 7 (2012) may still receive Android M after all
When Android M was officially announced, Google gave the bad news that the Nexus 4, Nexus 10, and Nexus 7 (2012) were not to receive the update due to the age of the devices, but that may be about to change.
A reference to the codename of the Nexus 10, manta, appeared in the AOSP repository for the device and an update dated May 28th was found marked as android-m-preview. Similar updates were found for the Nexus 4, and Nexus 7 WiFi, lending suggestion that those devices may actually receive the updated Android operating system.
It seems that Google is still investing in the older devices with the Android M rollout, which is great news for adopters of the Nexus devices, because that’s what the Nexus programme is all about. Whilst there’s no official announcements for the support of these devices, don’t be surprised if that changes closer to Android M’s public release.
The post Nexus 4, 10 and 7 (2012) may still receive Android M after all appeared first on AndroidGuys.
BlueStacks emulator puts Android apps on your OS X Mac
The BlueStacks Android emulator, which already has around 90 million Windows users, has finally arrived on OSX after an extended beta testing phase. The free emulator runs both x86 and ARM-based apps as well as provides full keyboard and mouse support. It even allows for gesture controls like pinch to zoom with a trackpad and takes advantage of your Mac’s Retina display. Users can sync files and data from their mobile devices or pull new apps from Google Play directly to their Mac. You can download the program directly from the BlueStacks website.
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Internet, Software, Apple, Google
Via: SlashGear
Source: BlueStacks
#ICYMI: Freezing lasers, tweeting video games and more
Today on In Case You Missed It: Microsoft debuts a Kinect-based room mapping system that understands furniture; we watch LEDs change color as they’re frozen in liquid nitrogen (because science!) and a programmer creates a game whose code fits into a single Tweet.
From the cutting room floor: Google rolls out 60 FPS video playback for its mobile app so now the walkthrough on your phone matches the gameplay on your console.
Let the team at Engadget know about any interesting stories or videos you stumble across by using the #ICYMI hashtag @engadget or @mskerryd.
Nexus 6 price plummets to £304 in the UK
A couple of weeks ago, Motorola slashed the prices of its top handsets in the UK as part of another of its temporary sales. If the opportunity to pick up a heavily discounted Moto X or Nexus 6 passed you by, we’ve got a couple of reasons you needn’t feel too dejected. Firstly, there’s rumblings of new hardware on the horizon, so that Moto X you could’ve snagged on the cheap mightn’t be as fresh as you’d like in the near future. If the Nexus 6 is more your bag, however, then we’ve got even better news. The official price of the Motorola-made handset has just hit an all-time low in the Google Store: the 32GB model is now only £304, and the 64GB version an equally reasonable £379.
That’s a serious saving over the £479 and £549 asking prices, respectively, on Motorola’s site; in fact, it’s even significantly cheaper than the £399 / £469 price tags Motorola was able to boast during its recent two-week sale (might be time to look into a refund?). Since there’s been no official communication of the Google Store price cut, we’ve reached out to the big G asking whether this is a temporary deal or a permanent fixture. Still, the fact remains you can grab a Nexus 6 from £304 right now, so it might be worth raiding your piggy bank if you’re interested. You know, just in case stock levels take a turn for the worse.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google
Source: Google Store
Yahoo begins testing search partnership with Google
Now that Yahoo and Microsoft are not exclusive anymore — when it comes to search, that is — they can both work with other companies. In fact, according to The New York Times, Mayer and her team have already started testing Google search ads in a small number of desktop and mobile queries. It was first discovered by SEOBook’s Aaron Wall, who alternately saw Yahoo results with Bing ads and ones with Google ads when he used different browsers. Both of them have confirmed the arrangement to NYT but wouldn’t discuss the partnership in detail. “As we work to create the absolute best experiences for Yahoo users, from time to time, we run small tests with a variety of partners including search providers,” was all the company said.
Yahoo and Microsoft revised their 10-year partnership in April: Bing used to provide Yahoo’s search results and ads exclusively. Now, the former has the right to enlist the help of other providers for up to 49 percent of its search results. The two could completely break up by October, as well, though it’s clear Yahoo’s still testing the waters before deciding. Google wanted to provide search ads for Yahoo way back in 2008, but that deal was nipped in the bud by the Justice Department. DOJ’s antitrust division believed the agreement could deny “consumers the benefits of competition,” so Google walked away. It’s unclear if they’ve already cleared things up with the agency this time, but the DOJ hasn’t issued an official statement about this potential partnership yet.
Source: SEOBook, The New York Times
Google discounts the 32GB Nexus 6 to £303 from the UK Play Store, £378 for the 64GB
While the rumours are going round about Android M and the Nexus 5 (2015) being released together, the Nexus 6 isn’t dead and buried just yet. If you live in the UK and have thought about upgrading to the Nexus 6, today might be the day you should take the plunge.
For reasons unknown, Google has slashed the prices of the Nexus 6 on the Play Store in the UK, the 32GB version has been discounted to a lowly £303.99, while the 64GB is a far more reasonable £378.99. Don’t forget that free shipping is included as well. Both the White and Midnight Blue variants are available, and all models are set to leave the warehouse in 1-2 business days. To put the today’s price slash into perspective, it was only a couple of weeks ago the 32GB Nexus 6 was discounted to £399, with the 64GB version dropping to £469 as part of Motorola’s UK summer sale.
It has to be asked if this is Google clearing its stocks of the Nexus 6 to make way for the rumoured new Nexus handset(s), and the answer is, who knows? There are no details available on how long the Nexus 6 will remain discounted, so if you were thinking of buying Google’s flagship handset, now’s the time. There’s (almost) nothing worse than seeing a great deal, dithering about whether you really need it, deciding you do and losing out on the discounted price. If you do, don’t forget to let us know which model you went for in the comments below.
Source: Play Store
Come comment on this article: Google discounts the 32GB Nexus 6 to £303 from the UK Play Store, £378 for the 64GB
Google’s chatbot learned it all from movies
Chatbots are pretty common these days — a simple search can surface numerous variants you can talk to on a lonely Friday night. The one Google is developing, however, isn’t your run-of-the-mill chatbot: it wasn’t programmed to respond to questions a specific way. Instead, it uses neural networks (a collection of machines that mimic the neurons in the human brain) to learn from existing conversations and conjure up its own answers. Mountain View, along with Facebook and Microsoft, already uses neural networks for other purposes, such as to create works of art, to identify objects in images and to recognize spoken words.
Google researchers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le fed this chatbot’s neural networks with movie dialogues to teach it what to say and how to formulate responses. As a result, its replies can be quite dramatic, like this “philosophical Q&A” test run, for example:
Human: what is the purpose of life ?
Machine: to serve the greater good .
Human: what is the purpose of living ?
Machine: to live forever .
Human: what is the purpose of existence ?
Machine:to find out what happens when we get to the planet earth.
Human: where are you now ?
Machine: i ‘m in the middle of nowhere .
Human: what is the purpose of dying ?
Machine: to have a life .
Human: what is the purpose of being intelligent?
Machine: to find out what it is .
And, of course, it knows its history and movie trivias really well:
Human: who is skywalker ?
Machine: he is a hero
…
Human: what do you think about tesla ?
Machine: he ‘s a good conductor .
Human: what do you think about bill gates ?
Machine: he ‘s a good man .
Human: What do you think about messi ?
Machine: he ‘s a great player .
Human: what do you think about cleopatra ?
Machine: oh , she ‘s very regal .
Human: what do you think about england during the reign of elizabeth ?
Machine: it was a great place
Google doesn’t have much use for a Trivial Pursuit champion, though, so the researchers also fed the system old support calls to see if it can do basic customer service one day:
Describe your problem: i forgot my password
Machine: hi , this is <NAME> from helpdesk connect , what can i help you with today ?
Human: hi , i forgot my password
Machine: ok great
Human: can you tell me how i can recover it ?
Machine: i ‘ ll need to verify who it is at that machine
Machine: can we do a hangout?
Human: yes
Machine: <anonymized hangout instructions and verifications>
Human: cool , i am good now
Machine: how ‘ s this looking good ?
Machine: i ‘ ll go ahead and close this chat .
Machine: take care . : )
Human: bye
Machine: bye .
The system is only a proof of concept at the moment, but the researchers believe it could be developed further. In addition to doing simple tech support (aka asking people if their computers are plugged in or to restart their PCs), it could also serve a new, more interactive way to deliver news. Le and Vinyal’s paper is up on Arxiv, if you want to pore over the bot’s technical details and to see more chat samples.
[Image credit: Her/Warner Bros.]
Via: The American Genius, Wired
Source: Google
That’s a little bit racist: Google Photos inadvertently labels people as “gorillas”
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Google Photos was a surprising star of the show at Google I/O 2015 with its new recognition feature being the most impressive of the lot. While it sounded almost too good to be true, it turns out it still has a few kinks in it, which developer Jacky Alcine found out it unfortunate fashion. While going through his collection of photos, the African-American Alcine found that he and a female friend had been labelled as “gorillas” by the recognition feature, and vented his dismay on Twitter:
And it’s only photos I have with her it’s doing this with (results truncated b/c personal): pic.twitter.com/h7MTXd3wgo
— diri noir avec banan (@jackyalcine) June 29, 2015
Unsurprisingly, Google‘s Chief Social Architect Yonatan Zunger was on the case quickly and understandably apologetic: “Holy [expletive]. G+ CA here. No, this is not how you determine someone’s target market. This is 100 percent not okay.” Zunger then worked with Alcine to investigate an issue so that a fix could be rolled out to Photos as soon as possible. Ironically, Zunger also divulged that the Photos app had a similar problem early in development when it would label normal humans as “dogs”. In an official statement given to Ars Technica, Google said:
“We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened. We are taking immediate action to prevent this type of result from appearing. There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.”
What do you think about this Google Photos hiccup? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: Ars Technica via BGR
The post That’s a little bit racist: Google Photos inadvertently labels people as “gorillas” appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
California kill switch bill goes into effect today – all phones to come with theft protection
Smartphone theft is a huge problem – one that costs mobile consumers about $2.5 billion a year. California is one of the first to take action by introducing a law that requests every phone sold in the state to include what has been commonly referred as a “kill switch”.
California bill SB-962 was finalized last August, when we were also informed the new regulation would go into effect starting July 1st 2015. Fast-forward nearly a year later and we are seeing things come to fruition. The day has come and the law goes into effect immediately.
For those who may be out of the loop, a kill switch is a system (hardware or software) that deems a smartphone unusable if reported stolen. Apple has been implementing its own technology for some time, but they are no longer alone. In fact, a long list of manufacturers, carriers and tech companies are backing this movement, including Google, Microsoft, Samsung and HTC.
Our beloved Google kept its promise to provide an effective kill switch with the introduction of Android Lollipop. It comes in the form of Factory Reset Protection, which allows smartphone owners to set a password the user would need to input before a factory data reset is performed. This, in combination with Android Device Manager (which can lock phones remotely), makes for a full kill switch method without any loopholes.
How many of us have gotten our smartphones stolen? It has happened to most of us, which means something definitely had to be done. Not everyone was for this kill switch idea. In fact, it was voted down by the senate at first, and those who make a profit out of phone insurances (carriers, insurance companies and the CTIA) were not too happy about the possibility of losing part of its $7.8 billion yearly profits.
The issue here is that this is a proven method and it’s already reducing smartphone theft! Kill switch systems have been put into effect by some companies before the law required phone makers to do so, and it’s doing wonders. Though about 2.1 million Americans had their smartphones stolen in 2014, this is a huge improvement over 2013.
Theft went down by 32%. More specifically, New York saw a 16% drop in handset robberies, and Apple phones had a 25% decrease in losses. Another report published this February also indicates San Francisco’s theft numbers went down by 40% in the last 12 months, while London was the star with a whopping 50% reduction. And it makes total sense! If every phone out there will be unusable when stolen, thieves will have very little incentive to steal them. That is, unless they want an amazing paper weight.
Even with all these advancements, though, 2.1 million thefts in 2014 is a big number. We certainly need to do better than that. For starters, people need to make sure they know how to protect themselves and actually use these kill switches. The implementation of this law keeps you protected only if you know how to operate the tools handed to you. We all still need to educate ourselves; only then can we make kill switches ubiquitous, and hence, effective.
How many of you guys have used these kill switches? Did it ever actually help you recover your device? Do you think kill switches are even the answer? Hit the comments and share your thoughts with all of us.
